Questions, Answers [Log]

Questions, Answers [Log]

Postby catch » Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:07 am

The sun had long ago set and with it came the fae creeping into the door like a phantom. The chill that has settle over the town does not seem to bother him as he wears little more than a white cotton shirt and his loose silk pants. His long hair is pulled back into a tight braid, a golden circlet placed a top his head. There is a strange look on his face when he spies Catch, his berry-stained lips pulling up at the corners until he is grinning at the back of the man's head cruelly. The expression is carefully dashed away before that one good eye of his can see it and he calls out to a bar maid to bring him a bottle of brandy. Instead of avoiding the mad man, he gravitates towards him, pulling up a chair just out of arm's reach of him. "Good evening, Catch." He takes note of the wine and stops the barmaid before she comes round with the bottle, requesting another bottle of wine to go with the brandy.

Catch does not see Cloud-hair as he came in, though he felt the breath of cold against his skin, delicate hairs rising on his arm as he shivers. Even if the insides of the tavern were warm, Catch sat in front of the hearth itself, so that he baked and basked like a cold-blooded lizard, and any breeze at all was a cold one. It was a bit of a relief, as he sweat profusely, though it wasn't from the heat. His bottle was empty, for he was obediant in most things, and he loved Miss Niall. He had almost dozed away when Cloud-hair greeted him, and his chin came up abruptly, his black eye owlishly blinking as he twists his face towards the source of the words. "... oh," he says, though he only sounds tired, and not angry or upset. "Hello, Cloud-hair." Even in his cups, Catch is polite, but it is more than the bare minimum of greeted. Catch acted as if he and Zilliah had never had any quarrel, and turned away to huddle against the couch's hard base-board.

"I didn't know that you drank wine, Catch. When did you pick up this habit, I wonder?" His own voice was as cool and calm as the breeze that washed over them. He too acted as if nothing were amiss between them. The fine hat was inspected next and then the bandaged eye. It looks like Glenn put up a bit of a fight before Catch had slit him open. He leans forward and places the wine bottle next to Catch and then settles back in his own chair, legs crossed daintily like a woman as he opens his own bottle of spirits. He takes a slow, thoughtful pull of it as he decides the best way to handle the situation. It looked as if things were going to be easier with the poor man's mind a haze with alcohol."They dress you up like a man, they teach you words and morals. "They give you wine and try to make you a real man. What next, I wonder? Taking you to a brothel?" He laughs darkly at this idea. "Tell me Catch, has anyone ever explained to you what a tea party is? Do you even want to know or do you like them teasing you about it all the time, laughing behind your back at your innocence?"

A simple, soft robe was drapped over the redhead's shoulders, too large for her lean frame, but also long enough that even with her height it caressed the floorboards and flopped down steps as it trailed behind her. She gripped the bannister firmly with each careful step, watching the trecherous stairs and not looking up until the bottom step had been conquered. A fair smile had returned to her face, she seemed at the very least to have somewhat recovered from the shock of Catch's actions against her employer. All the same, she looked exhausted and at such an hour, still being awake, was it any wonder the dark circles under her eyes began to show? It was more an attempt to speak in the Fae's mind that sent a flash of protective anger his way. But the words eventually just came out, plain as anything, over her lips. "I ...v-very much doubt you have to explain it to him.. he boasts about his ideas on the matter far too often to not know," she was also a smidge upset with Catch from their last encounter... which had ended on a similar topic.

Cloud-hair had brought him wine. Perhaps things were, if not well, then at least stable between them. Perhaps Catch had given Zilliah a small amount of respect, opening his mind as he had, even if Cloud-hair had pulled his flowers, later, out of spite. Or the Sky Lady had shamed him into not being wicked, at least around Catch, and that's really all the addled man could hope for, was it not? Either way, Catch takes the bottle as it was offered, not wishing to be rude, and takes a mouthful, because he doesn't know much better. Even if the spirits are starting to stick in his throat, and made him too warm for fires. "Iron Shoes g-gives me some, s-s-s-sometimes," he says, his words slurred and sad. He missed Iron Shoes. When would she come back? When would everyone come back? There were people he missed that had not come for awhile. And into this frame of mind, Zilliah threw his words, and Catch twisted his head to peer up at him, both drunk-muzzled eye and filthy bandage, with a slow, studious frown on his lips. "What's a brothel?" he asks, though the fae's other words are not lost on him, the way his fingers tighten on the bottle. But here is Genny. Catch can smile brightly at Genny, there in her soft robe, and he grins a silly grin, and can turn back to Cloud-hair in a better frame of mind. "I know. whu-whu-what a tea party is. I've h-h-had them, you know."

Whatever mood the fae seems to be stuck in would not be easily swept away by the arrival of Genny. His pale eyes slide over to her with a wry grin. "A brothel. Well. Around here they call brothels Tea Houses." He swirls the brandy around in his bottle and looks back over to the drunken man. "No Catch, I don't think you have had the sort of tea party that everyone snickers about." He takes another drink of his brandy and then looks back up at Genny. There was no mercy to him tonight and even if she tried, she would find his mind shut tight to her. "Tell me then, Genny. What is a tea party? I don't fancy you have ever had one either but I think you might know what happens at them, yes?"

Catch reeled around giving a tipsy if not drunk smile to her, but all she saw in it was the filthy bandage. The quest for tea to send her off to bed would have to wait. Nearing Catch she'd gently set her hand on his cheek, hoping not to alarm him - his normal state was bad enough, but with alcohol, who was to say how he'd react to the touch. If he didn't reel away she would try to pull if face and inspect the bandage, unwrapping it to inspect the wound. Surely if it was bad she would redress it, there had been enough salve made to last the remainder of the year, not that so much was necessary. The banter didn't seem to bother a focus mind, and though she flinched a little when Zilliah asked, her lips would merely purse either because she knew and didn't want to answer or felt no good reason to. "Catch, have you changed this or cleaned it since I set the last bandage?"
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Postby catch » Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:09 am

Catch only watched Genny as she came closer, and he only smiled at her, and even if it was drunk and empty, there was still a warmth to it. His cheek, though pale, was slick with silver sweat, and the muscles of his jaw spasmed under her fingers. But Catch, himself, did not pull away, even as she undid the bandage to reveal hot flesh and the draining eye. It looked better, at least, though some infection lurked, and his blue eye seemed to slide about, rather than catch the sudden, blurred images that came to it. "I d-didn't touch it at all, juh, just like you said," he slurs at her, and sounds very proud of himself for it. Catch tries to see Cloud-hair, but he has to hold very still, the way Genny is holding him. "I know ah-about the Tea House. Ser G-glenn said he wuh, would t-take me there." That was after the maggots, but before Catch could remember him becoming wicked. Catch's voice reflected his sadness, and he shuddered again under Genny's fingers. He really, really was beginning to not feel well. "It is when t-two people love eachother very, very muh-much, and they ha-ha-have tea tuh, together." His words come, slow and cautious. Because he does remember, how red Genny had become, and the gentle lecture he had recieved after it, from Ser Kerrak.

The eye. The bandage. It was silly and useless and pointless. When did this change happen as well? When did they convince this creature that he could not heal his own wounds? That he should stay maimed and bruises and bloodied just like the mortals he befriended? It was so pathetic and humbling at the same time. He had to admit there was something about the way Glenn had tamed this beast that had worked. Genny had her back to him now and he could see the pain rippling in the man's too tense muscles as she tended to his eye. There would be the faint glowing of his third eye then as his mind began to cautiously slip into Catch's. There would be no voice, no obvious feeling of his presence. He sought out the deep dark things in the man's unconsciousness. He had no interest in the wolf, the fat man, or the bees. He honed in for the memory of the scar and how it came to be, indeed how Catch himself came to be. But he did not do this without some measure of control and his fail safes were in place should those golden whips come flying out of his mind after him. His voice comes out faint and almost far away. "You are almost correct, Catch, almost. You're wrong about two people loving each other though. Tea parties especially do not call for the two people to love each other. Most tea parties are born out of pure selfish desire. The woman desires coin and the man desires her flesh."

"Tea parties," Genny adds or corrects, "Are different for everyone, corporeal pleasures for some... a loving and significant bond for others," there is a deep sigh as she is surely out of her depth and treading on topics far from her main concern. They were likely to just confuse the madman more with no frame of reference. A frown sticks to her face and becomes worrysome as is slides down. Holding Catch's face she wipes away some of the sweat with her thumb and tosses the bandages to the side. "We'll drain it and set it again with silver salt and salve..." The silver would likely rid the threatening infection, else she'd have to convince him to visit the Rememdium. She lets her hand fall watching him with some worry, then turning to face Zilliah the worry remained and little else before she headed to the kitchen. "Catch, when you're done... well, er, just come to the kitchen and I'll put a new bandage on," simple enough instructions. She would prepare the improved batch in the meantime, waiting for him away from conversations she rather had no place within.

"Okay. Miss G-genny." Catch would watch her go, and - indeed - he was confused by her answers, by Cloud-hair's, because what did tea have to do with flesh and coin? He truly did not know what they were speaking of, and Catch gently touched his eye, the blue thing rolling and blinking of it's own accord, before finally snapping to Zilliah. "Th-there's a lot of th-things, with coin," he says, muzzy and uncertain. Now he did feel like he was missing something, that others were laughing behind his back about a thing he didn't know about. But before he could ask, there was a something, a brief, momentary flash of surprise. Then there was pain, not for Zilliah, but for Catch. It lanced through his mangled brow like a hot, glass knife, and it hurt so bad that the drink-laden madman couldn't blink, couldn't scream, but could only sit there, his mouth open and soundless, his eyes wide and wild and blank and there was Timelessness, and there were 'people', in the faintest sense of the word, a man of red, a black doe, a white wolf, and the white wolf snapped at the doe's heels, and she ran, far and fast and there was a girl, and she was weeping while a man stood over her, a wolf's hide thrown over his shoulders; a man that was Catch, and wasn't, those handsome, feral features bearing an expression that Catch could never wear, could never wear she was a spider, a hideous amalgamation of woman and arachnid. There was a boy, and he stood before the Wolf-skin man who was writing things in the dust, and they stood, together, over the ruins of a small town. And then the boy was taken away, taken to a place of learned men, and he stood before the Grey Eminence who looked, as Treadwell may have looked, had the Councilman been thin as a pole. And the Grey Eminence looked over him with a strange, terrible, look, and it was the City. The Golden City, and it's orgy of blood and sex and sound. Watch it fall, Cloud-hair, watch them all die and go mad to drive out the sounds, as the Spider-woman emerges from the belly and throat of another Treadwell, a fatter Treadwell, yet not quite fat enough after she emerged. And it repeated, over and over again, the Grand Catch and the Spider-Thing, worlds upon worlds, until this place grew, over the bones of the last, and it became old and ancient, and filled with all manner of creatures, and the Three decided that it was enough, that God and Immortal and Mortal were one, destiny taken back into the hands of Man. See It taken, the pain, the violation. It is taken, and Catch is left, broken and bound, and yet still he persists, still he lives, discovered long after the Three are dead and their bones turned to ash and dust. Through centuries, from town to town, kingdom to kingdom, he wanders. He is driven out, he is killed, for crimes he cannot remember. The touch of pretty dresses, of silken hair, childish rages and childish fright turned fatal. But mortal wounds heal, and he picks himself back up from under the gibbet-trees, and he goes on. Until it called him, here, though he did not know it. He thought a bear told him. And that Eye, it hovered over the lake, and down the lake, hidden and precious, and he needed to find it before he went down the maggot-holes and found his Matron, his Mother, and they danced their dance, and she kissed him on the cheek and embraced him and through it all, through the images and emotion, Catch was locked inside his flesh, unable to scream or howl his pain, ignorant of what Zilliah saw.

Genny had fled to the kitchen, his crass remarks doing a perfect job of running her off before he got down to the meat of it. He did not want her to witness this, to see him hurt Catch in such a way. He would tell her it was for Glenn, her employer and supposed friend. It was true enough, though not the whole truth behind the attack. What else would one call such a vile intrusion of one’s' mind? He did it for Drache as well, and yes, for himself. He’d once told himself that he didn’t want to know and if it had just been him and Catch out in the wilds together he might never have sought out the truth. Such was not the case though, and they both chose to walk among men, to even dare act and look like men. All talk of tea parties ceases. In fact all speech at all has died away and there is only the silent scream of Catch'’s pain and the fierce violet light spilling from the fae’s head as he sees it all. Or rather, his eye sees it all, the gem acting like a filter or a net that traps it all within his mind so that he can try to look back on it and make sense of it later. If that was even possible. The snippets he does allow to pass through frighten him. Was he like this too? Going from one life to the next completely unaware of who and what he is? He only looked like a man because he willed it so and an elf more than a human because that was what inhabited the lands of his birth so many centuries ago. The answers he stole from Catch’s mind would only bring more questions rather than answers. How was he to decipher this and be able to explain it to Glenn without being able to show him directly? He seeks one last answer before he pulls out of the man’s mind. The lake. What was in the lake that he must retrieve before he went down the maggot holes?
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Postby catch » Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:10 am

The Thing, the Lake, the Eye. They were there, but they boiled, angry waters that howled and ate viciously at the shore. For a moment there is a clear image, a vision at the filter of his eye, a grey man, with a bald pate, with shadowy images of two others behind him. He struggled, as his tattered robes whipped about him, to stay upright in the torrent, his hand reached towards Zilliah. He shouted something, and it seemed urgent, but a wolf howled just then, as he opened his mouth. He could not be heard. And just as suddenly as the Three had come, they were gone again, taken by the image that Zilliah knew well. The Lady Lamai had healed it, and it stared at him with the same, wicked expression the Man had taken, wrought clear on a beastial face, a White wolf of magnificence. It did not seek to stop in. It welcomed him, and showed the fae precisely what he wanted. It was then, only then, that Catch could find his strength, past pain unimaginable. It was an awareness that shifted in him, a brief warning for Cloud-hair, for Catch knew where this pain came from. Zilliah was making him dance, was smashing everything in his skull to tiny pieces. The addled man lifts his hand, uncoordinated, and he lashes out, wildly, at the seated fae. It is not his fist, alone; as it extends, so too do silver tendrils seem to sprout from his skin, piercing through his bones, flowing like water. They, too, strike, stabbing like leeches at Cloud-hair's flesh.

He saw it, the thing that Glenn wanted to know so badly. He had what he had come for and just like that he is gone from his mind. He wouldn’t have needed any warning to protect himself from those silvery tendrils. He’d seen and faced them before and his unseen defenses had been up around him long before his third eye had opened to pluck out the knowledge. Just as they did at the ball, they slam into the invisible force that surrounds the fae. He does not move, does not try to run and flee from the anger and rage that pours like liquid silver from his body. He would wait patiently until the thrashing tentacles of light give up and evaporate. In the silence that follows he places his brandy bottle out of the way and holds his hands up, thumbs flicking purposefully over the orbicular jade rings on his middle fingers so that the hidden blades spring out. He rises slowly to his feet, arms held out before him so that he can draw the razor sharp blades over the pale flesh of his hands. Crimson wells to the surface, trickling down his forearms to spatter and stain his silken pants. He stands over Catch, his right arm lifted above his head, ringed hand balled into a fist that he pumps to get the blood flowing like a river to wash over his ruined face and eye. His other hand finds the back of his hand and he traces a ruin on his flesh. One last thing to find out before he gives the creature his peace! What will his blood do to this thing, this wild beast? Will it heal him, will it fix the damage that Glenn inflicted on him? He kneels down as the blood pours from him, chanting words of power to mold his flesh and restore it. He tries to knick Catch with his ring blade and gather some of the mad man’s blood. If he succeeds he will bring it to his blue stained lips and slice his own tongue open to let his blood meld with his own. If Glenn intended to use it as a weapon against him he might as well find out why.

The tendrils lasted only as long as the pain did, unconciously striking at Zilliah fruitlessly, like semi-intelligent snakes. And when the fae withdrew? They were gone, sliding back under Catch's skin like silk, leaving the madman moaning and twitching on the floor. He could not move, his brains battered to bits, and throbbing so hard that it seems his brain were squirming out of his scar. He couldn't let that happen! Yet, already he was feeling wetness on his face, and his hands come up to touch it, feeble and confused. It is Zilliah's blood that falls on him, but he doesn't know. Cloud-hair has split Catch's head open. It was real, this time, and not a vision of madness. Even as his eye twitches back to where it belonged, and the flesh around it is restored, Catch begins to cry, holding his head together with his palms on either side of his skull. He forgot all about Iron Shoes, or what she may think. He cried, and screamed, his voice a mixture of a man and animal's terror. When Ser Glenn had taken his blood, he had re-lived the spiders erupting from him with Faeryl's spell. Pantha, too, had relived the worst of her life. What was there left for the fae to see, he who had, already, seen so much?

Cloud-Hair is wicked. He finally did what the others were not cruel enough to do. He could see now why Glenn had not sent Rhaena to do this job. It wasn’t out of fear that Catch would harm his love, oh no, it wasn’t that. Rhaena was too kind to do something like this to the poor man. She liked him, she cared for him in that weird, sick way that so many in this town did. And Glenn Burnie was not cruel enough to ask her to do this, not when he could have someone else spare her from it. It was a kind thing he just did, don’t you see? The gore that coats Catch’s head is changing colors down as the archaic words die on the handsome fae’s pretty lips. It turns from deep, dark red to orange and then bright gold. It dries away leaving flakes of gold where it touches his flesh, the puddles of it pooling on the floorboards hardening into solid hunks. The wounds he has inflicted on himself close up as well as he smears the golden residue on his face, painting his lips and eyelids with it. All the while a low, maddened laughter rumbles from his throat. Catch’s blood has worked its way into his bloodstream and it begins to course through him until it takes over and fills his mind. Everything around him erupts in vivid light as if the sun has risen right there in the inn to illuminate it with bright light that makes the hues of everything pop. He reels, jeweled hands coming up to clutch at his head and the laughter is replaced by an excited gasp. There would be no horrors for the fae to relive like there were for Glenn and Pantha. The only terrible things that had ever happened to him he relived on a daily basis. The wings, the eye, Snowy. The hallucinations began, hitting him faster and harder than any mushroom he has ingested and he loves it. Who else but the wicked Cloud-Hair would actually enjoy this? He twirls around, arms spread out wide and his head thrown back so he can stare wildly up at the ceiling. He hears the bees and sees the honey seeping down the walls. And the Wolf, he laughs. Eventually he stumbles towards the door and out into the cold night, leaving Catch there on the floor in his pain alone to suffer through it.
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Epilogue

Postby catch » Tue Oct 04, 2011 7:15 am

It was a long, long time before Catch had the courage to unwind himself, to take his hands from his head in a momentous act of courage that, nevertheless, made him shake. Made him weep, he who had not cried in so long, barring his upset at his misunderstanding of Niall. The vague thought that Genny was waiting for him, in the kitchen, surfaced only briefly. Gold showered around him as he pushed himself from the floor, and for a moment, he panics, thinking it his his brains trickling out. But, it's not. It's gold, and Catch was fairly certain his brains weren't made of gold, and he runs his fingers through the rocky remains with trembling fingers.

He did not know what Cloud-hair had done to him. He had not made Catch dance, not physically, but had done something. Had split his head, had sifted through the insides of it. Catch did not see what Zilliah had seen, and so it was senseless, and cruel. It was a punishment, wasn't it? For trying to heal Ser Glenn. It was the only way he could make sense of it, and his sore, throbbing mind closed on it, the way his fingers closed on it. They would hurt him, would they? Catch brought his gold-powdered fingers to his belly, where Pantha's dagger lay, just under the skin. No. He'd need something else, something he could remember. Slowly, Catch got to his feet. That his eye had been fixed was something that did not occur to him, because it was something that happened often, and of it's own accord. It was a terrible, hard thing, and the blue iris was infused, now, with gold, the pupil and the rim gone from black to blistering shine.

He would get the axe, outside. He would carry it with him. Then, they wouldn't try to punish him. His strange, new eye flickered towards the kitchen door, and he hesitates. Miss Genny would be waiting for him...

Get the axe, first.

Obedient to that thought, Catch turned, instead, for the front door. He would not return, tonight. But the axe he had wielded, so often, in service to the Dagger, supplying her with wood, would be gone, and so would Catch.
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