secrets are like ghosts. it’s like living with ghosts. ( spencer to hypnos )
ASKS—ACCEPTING:
The idle march of an overhanging clock comes to a standstill, a slow, hypnotic drip starts up from the nearby faucet. Something indistinguishable has shifted in the air. Hypnos steps through the ajar door feigning security between the outside world and the foyer.
Still, curiously, he resembles his brother, looming in the threshold as quiet as death, and studies the wreckage of Spencer's silhouette, perpetual bruising around the eyes of the god, irises black as Styx. The rest of him is as pale as moon dust, nearly glowing as though to deter anyone from looking at him directly, the buzz of what could only be described as a faulty street light sourceless but apparent is his presence.
Dilaudid. Hypnos can smell it on him—under his skin, and his nose recoils into a wrinkled grimace. Not as evasive and playful as some of his elixirs. Dilaudid makes the blood heavy, pins you beneath its pleasure, does not merely distract but erases. But then again, the mind becomes a fog, and even Hypnos can scarcely structure a dream around its influence. Instead they come out half baked, and wrong. Hypnos' canines only drip it under the most acute agony of his existence, few and far between. How mortals ever got ahold of it is beyond him.
Hypnos is all legs when he crouches down in front of Spencer, his knees up to his ears and his gaze black and animal, but—there is something soft and sympathetic that retreats briefly into his pupils.
"Ghost can be....the cream of comfort. Still, they are not always kind, even when they intend to be. Their touch as thin as memory. They cannot help you, Spencer. I can help you." His voice tremors when he speaks, like the soft purr of a ceiling fan in the dead of night.
