AND YOU WERE THERE, and YOU were there....

[conning]

He wakes up in the wrong place. That, he knows. He knows it the same way he knows his cheek is resting against stone, the way the air tastes like night time and high altitudes.

Slowly, he blinks his eyes open, staring at the wall of the alley for several long seconds until he realizes that's what it is. He's in an alley, with cobblestone paving, with architecture that he doesn't quite recognize. Everything aches, everything, from his crown to the bare soles of his feet.

He rolls onto his side, then it's onto all fours, onto one knee, stand. He doesn't walk so much as lose his balance in a forward direction, stumbling into the street in an emerald green suit that would be quite at home in 21st century Manhattan.

Comments

[conning]

Here is what Zerxus doesn't see:

Laerryn barely standing until he's out of sight, when she crumples onto her knees at Evandrin's bedside.

Tears on Neal's face that don't belong to him, tears on his hand as Laerryn clutches it against her lips.

An apology, whispered over and over, and Evandrin waiting until she can stop repeating it to say I forgive you.

Not because there's anything to forgive, in his mind. Because she needs to hear it more than he needs to tell her she didn't do anything wrong.

That's what he doesn't see.

When he comes back with Quay, he'll see Laerryn sitting calmly on the cot, stroking Neal's hair absently, less like a mother and more like someone preoccupied by their neighbor's cat. She's not looking at him. He seems asleep.

She glances up when they walk in, her expression as neutral as possible when her eyes are still a little too bright.

"I think he's gone."

[withintenfeet]

Almost always, Loquatius is an effervescent whirlwind of a person. Zerxus has seen him waltz through battles of words and blades and fireballs alike, heard him puncture centuries of tension with a dozen words or less.

He most have heard something, in Laerryn's voice. There's a grim intensity to him now, a focus sharpened into something uncanny, and those gleaming silver eyes only turn more piercing as they take in his friend's expression.

"What's going on?"

Zerxus explains as much he can, walking Quay up to the room, but he can feel the moment it all really hits: seeing Laerryn there, clinging to composure with her fingernails, tender and brittle and so horribly, beautifully stubborn.

"Well, fuck."

[conning]

She blinks, like someone waking up as they start to nod off, and the curse gets the briefest ghost of a smile. Only the people who know her best would even be able to see it, in the way her eyes crinkle so very very briefly.

She stands. "His breathing doesn't sound great."

She could clarify that she means Neal's, but clarifying means further assertion that Evandrin is gone.

A spark of rebellion lands on something in her spirit and starts to burn. Gone, but not out of reach.