#elpisi

am | WORLD BUILDING & DEVELOPMENT

as bleak as it sounds ?  not really.  it’s mostly a lack of connection to religious or familialtraditions    (  calling your genetic mother old isn’t a tradition ,  no matter how many times you do it  )     and most of the things they do choose to celebrate are self referential and seemingly chosen at random. 

[australian yelling in corner]

     he finds the house with little effort. it's a proper house, all suburban and proper. there are even plants that aren't in pots for christ’s sake. it's enough to offend the sensibilities of any self-respecting immortal with a shit job who’s living in his sister’s flat so that he isn’t squatting in a different place every week. he steels himself, letting the nerves and apprehension drain from his body, taking all the tension he’d been carrying with it. apathy is his weapon of choice as well as his protection.

     he walks up to the door and knocks, not even bothering to check if there’s a bell. as he waits for an answer he rehearses what he wants to say (for the millionth time) and confirms with himself what he needs to tell her. well, he doesn’t need to tell her. but he feels he owes it to her since he hasn’t been paying rent (or fixed the hole in the wall. oh, and there was also the matter of that scarring, although the marks on his chest bore testament to the fact that he hadn’t gotten away free from that particular battle either). the door opens and he grins cockily but it vanishes when he catches sight of her face, his plans with it.

u old bruh

he throws back the covers and forces himself to his feet, staggering into the bathroom with all the dexterity of a kid who's just gotten off a roundabout. it was a few seconds before he noticed his reflection...

well fuck. he should have expected that this would be the face staring back, although it was a surprise that he'd manage to sleep through the transition. usually it hurt to become this miserable sack of shit. trying to summon the energy to strip off his underpants, he turns the taps on the tiny bath. he's never used the facilities in his sister's apartment before and he feels too god damned awful to bother with temperature testing. when he gets in (still in his underwear, because fuck it) it's too fucking hot, not enough to burn but still on the wrong side of painful. the sensitive skin over the healing stab wounds courtesy of his dear sister ached, even as the tension in his head eased slightly. 

the bath itself was tiny, probably meant more as a selling feature than an actual functional space, so in order to get his shoulders underwater he was forced to bend his legs almost double. he knew that some shed skins and changed faces like it was a game but he'd always found it so difficult. it's why he kept going back to the same familiar faces every time. he knew those faces, how they worked, what expressions looked like. but this face...

whether it was the face itself, the physical composition of this particular formation of his brain, or just the psychological impact of having this appearance, he always felt so absurdly vulnerable. it's why he refused to acknowledge this face as part of eric (even though he knew it was more him than any other). this face was naoise, a phase to be endured just like this shitty fucking hangover.