a soft-spoken lizard wizard

“You could always ask before you go rummaging through my things, you know.”

Violet answers with a scoff, the bulk of his focus still centered squarely on the thing in his hands. “That’s no fun. Tell me.”

Rook shifts in his seat, setting the book in his hand to one side before letting his own focus settle on the object in question: a small flute, just big enough to fit in the palm of Violet’s hand, carved from bone into the shape of a round bird, painted in what must have once been vibrant hues, now well-faded, chipped and flaking where the patterns haven’t already been worn away.

Again, he pauses.

“I don’t know.”

Violet finally turns to look up at him, the expression on his face landing somewhere between skeptical and annoyed.

“What, is this another one of those things you ‘don’t remember?’” Even without the accompanying gesture, the air quotes are perfectly audible in Violet’s voice. “Or is it just something you don’t want to talk about?”

To that, Rook simply shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he repeats himself, his own voice every bit as level and unbothered as before. “It really isn’t any more complicated than that.”

And, to that, Violet’s ears flick back as his lips purse into an irritated frown.

“Why do you have it, then?”

He’s finally learning how to ask the right questions, it would seem. Rook tips his head back, staring up at the ceiling while he mulls over his words.

“It was one of the only belongings I had on me,” he finally says, after far too long a silence, his gaze still turned upward. “When they found me, at Carteneau... At least, that’s what I was told. I couldn’t remember; I couldn’t know if they were telling me the truth.”

The silence that follows then is far, far too long. Terrible wings, impossibly huge, stretch wide across the entire span of his memory, casting all that came before into darkest oblivion.

“You never told me you were at Carteneau.”

Violet’s voice is uncharacteristically soft, so much so that Rook can’t help but look back down to him with a raised brow.

“You never asked.”

He says it plainly, matter-of-factly, in that usual, teasing way which almost never fails to rile Violet into answering with outsized indignation. But Violet doesn’t respond at all, not even to turn to look back at him; he continues to stare down at the little flute instead, his ears lying back, his brow furrowed, his expression inscrutable.

“I guess not.”

Violet finally speaks, but his mind is clearly somewhere else, somewhere too distant for Rook to reach. He cants his head to one side, briefly, and deliberates over his next course of action...for all of a moment, before he makes his choice: to wrap one arm about Violet’s shoulders, letting his hand come to rest between his ears, to which Violet responds by curling inward, settling the entirety of his weight into Rook’s embrace.