#!!! hello

@bvmmerset​ asked :  “ i’ll never forget their faces. i still see them every night. “

         emerald hues lift from the article before her to levi as his words begin to register. it’s one of the worst and most important part of their job. they’re there typically on people’s worst days. there to bare witness to all the horrors that humanity seems to inflict on each other and she gets it. truly. five years into this---- and there’s quite a few faces she sees almost daily. a routine of broken bodies and devastated family's playing on a loop.

        she’s not sure if he’ll be annoyed that she’d been looking through his work--- it’s not as if they’ve gotten off to the best start. stuck in a single room together, both assigned to cover the unstable political uprisings taking place overseas. it’s grueling working together each day. their environment doesn’t exactly ease any tension but, he’s stuck with her. at least for the next foreseeable future the two of them have no choice but to find a way to work together. snooping on his previous works might not have been the best decision in hindsight. 

       “ how long had you been in it when you covered this? ”  she asked, nudging towards the article he’d been talking about. it’s in her nature to be curious. to ask despite the warning signs that someone else... might not want that.

𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐃 & 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐅𝐄𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄

sitting just a few steps down from the throne, the second corinthian has been reading unwritten tales of his predecessor. stories that the first corinthian's victims had created in their minds, books they thought they might write when they survived. they all exist within lucienne's library, and so the nightmare has been perusing them here and there, trying to see if any of them jog a memory. he doesn't tell dream what he's reading. if there's a problem, he's sure his lord will let him know.

eventually, he tosses the book to the bottom of the stairs. it lands with a hollow thud. "this one is nonsense." many of the books about the first corinthian are difficult to read, even for a dream - the narrative is often incoherent, more images and feelings than words. a natural consequence of being scared shitless while someone ties you to a chair or throws you in his trunk, he supposes. this one isn't. it's just badly written. "maybe it's a good thing he didn't survive to become a writer."

perhaps he should have been paying more attention. dream's attention comes up from his book on the greek gods, and he raises his eyebrows. the words that had come out of the corinthian alone were concerning in of themselves. he has an instinct that is tuned into the nightmare, to listen out for ... for lack of a better way to say it, murderous tendencies. the first corinthian had, after all, been his predecessor's greatest mistake. and that shame and guilt had been passed onto him, in a way. regardless, he supposes commenting on how good it was that someone hadn't survived something, counted. correct?