#caesia

Due to their general incompatibility, I will need to axe either Caesia or Hoth from my game:

Pros for Hoth:

1) He and Lucien talk to each other

2) Strong bodyguard, we need those in this mess when even inigo, lucien and a dog can’t exactly keep all the rubble at bay.

3) Cool outfit, if a bit edgy.

4) Apparently he has locational radiant quests and shit, so there’s also that.

Pros for Caesia:

1) She’s self aware.

2) She specifically states that she is not, in any way, going to fuck you unless you force her into it via “tricks and magical powers.”

3) She sticks out like a sore thumb yes but hey, it’s a miracle she’s not getting naked for no reason as of now.

4) Diversity Hire? She is, like, the only female follower in the load-out at the moment, my team seems like that one meme about the woman on a couch with several black men towering behind her, but the woman is my last dragonborn, and the men are Inigo, Lucien, Hoth, Benjamin Doon and M.H.A.R.P.H.I.N.

White and wide, he dreams of something powerful pulsing through his veins, an exuberant, thrumming force that lifts him up, up, up –

He dreams of flying.

In a city like this, constructed of concrete boxes packed tightly in tandem, tamped shut by grey ceilings until there is hardly room to breathe between the glass and the smog – it is merely that: a dream. In this plane of reality, flight is something that takes place in a torpedo-shaped container that serves trays of processed food and affords hardly any leg space.

But still, he dreams.

A glorious white-wide-blue-sky vision that visits him with enough frequency that the nights become a rehearsal of anticipation, until eventually the darkness of his eyes closing bleeds into the sensation of an Abyss, a big black hole sucking him down with awful intensity, crushing the air out of his lungs; he is falling, falling,

falling—!

He awakes with a start, clutching his bed sheets until he can reassure himself that gravity still works the way he remembers it. He breathes out slowly, releasing the steel coils of his mattress and feeling apologetic for the small squeak they produce as he lets go.

There is a pain between both his shoulder blades when he sits up. Like the dream, the pain becomes perpetual over time. Poor posture, some of his classmates say. (He does have a tendency to slouch.) An amicable stranger tells him to try physical therapy. (He tries it.)

But it’s a different sort of ache, unresponsive to balms and heat packs and stretches found on the Internet. One that runs deeper than the muscle; simmers like a quiet flame between the sinewy sulcus of tendon and bone. A hungry ache that throbs most fiercely in the early hours of the morning when he’s just awoken from the dream, an ache like a hole after a tooth has been wrenched out, an ache like the stump of a tree cut down, an ache of absence, an ache of - 

“Is something bothering you, Keane?” she asks, in that wide-eyed, gentle way of hers. Her face is practically spilling over with worry as she peers closely at him, plum-colored hair catching the light. Her name is Ein. She’s a friendly stranger that he’s newly met in the city a few weeks ago; but there’s an odd kinship that brings them together from the start. It only feels natural.

(Sometimes she is in his dreams too; but of course he can’t tell her that. They’ve only just met.)

His hand quickly lowers from where it had been creeping up towards the inner curve of his scapula, responsibly stuffs itself into his back pant pocket.

“No—no, it’s nothing,” he assures her, assures himself, hastily smiling to ward off any further concern.

There is no need to worry when it is only a dream.

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