"They hate you? The friendliest lost cause enthusiast and idealist?" He scoffed. The very idea was ridiculous. "There must be something fundamentally wrong with them."

James stretched his legs out and slid lower in his chair, so he could stare at the ceiling. He was trying to read a book earlier, but the text kept blurring, no matter how hard he focused, so he resigned before a headache developed.

"I can think of one person being disappointed. Wouldn't call that missing. Nor mourning." He raised the stump of his hand up and stared at it, thinking how it would feel to stretch his fingers too. Which muscles he'd feel tense if it wasn't gone.

@notbirdnorplane said: "i'm like a bad penny, i always turn up." - Gummigoo to Pomni // reunited vibes??

"G-Gummigoo...?" Pomni's eyes slowly widened in sheer disbelief. The last time she had seen the alligator he had exploded into confetti. Needless to say, she was still traumatized.

This...this had to be a hallucination right? Maybe she was finally going crazy. She knows everyone was just waiting for her to crack next.

"You can fucking fly?!" He regretted his choice of words and tone, but at the moment he just flopped on his back, glad to feel, wherever he still could, the pressure of his own weight on a solid ground. He needed a moment to just enjoy not moving faster than a jet. One thing was floating, the other carrying a passenger to another continent this fast.

Next thing he could remember clearly was being squashed in Ghira's massive arms and Kali's bright laughter. It felt so normal, like it was taken out from a lifetime ago, that it made him dizzy. They talked with Superman, but the whole situation was so surreal, James caught himself waiting to wake up at any moment. He was offered a room. It was all so right that it felt fundamentally wrong. He avoided the bed. Would hate to stain it and ushered to shower, he just let water wash over him. He didn't deserve a good bed. The floor was more familiar and it remained painfully real whenever sore joints woke him up. It was solid and certain, it hurt so it had to be real.

And then there was Superman. Always bright like a sunshine, carrying more faith in the good than James had ever seen. He didn't recall how Superman coaxed him to see someone head-smart. James didn't see a point in talking with them, so for a long time he didn't, but he couldn't just do the same to that young man who so persistently put so much effort in visiting and talking to him, even though James had nothing to say.

He didn't know how many weeks or months have passed, but one day a thought that he could cut his hair and trim his beard occurred. It was strange. He got so used to ignoring this messed up caveman looking at him from the mirror, that he almost missed a moment when he started looking more like a person again. He showered better and surely smelled better. But he couldn't trim his hair. The right hand wouldn't move so far up and neither of the fingers closed fully, so he couldn't use scissors. Somehow, barely holding anything else didn't bother him, until this thought appeared. He couldn't trim his beard nor he could tie his hair as a temporary solution.

"We can do something about it." Superman was confident as usual, his eyes sparkling with accomplishment that James didn't understand.

"Are you sure your name isn't Hope?" He chuckled, taken aback by such an easily laid out plan, list of capable mechanics, bioengineers and prosthetists ready to be discussed. He barely thought about a problem at hand and Superman was already there, a few steps ahead and pulling him along.

Spending days one-handed was a step forward that felt more like a step backward. Repairs and readjustments to his right side didn't leave the same impact as losing his hand again. He knew it was temporary and simply it had to be redone from scratch, but he still ended up flailing the stump pointlessly in short moments of forgetting that his left hand wasn't there.

There were days he'd rather not get up from the floor, hugging the stump close, mourning the loss and the sensations he will never feel again, as no prosthetics could achieve what real skin and nerves were able to. Yet there was Superman again, not taking his protests for an answer, pulling him to at least play some board games together. It took James a long time to notice the pattern of most games being strategy ones, of slowly pushing him back into what he used to be actually good at. There were also sparring offers, which he shot down mercilessly, until he gave in, if just to make the young man stop asking. Of course, he lost the match poorly. He was old, slow, just regaining full mobility and still down to only one hand, vision in one eye also impaired, but he would hate to admit it and so come up with even more problems with him. There were more than enough as it was. He blamed it on being about twice Superman's age and refused to discuss it further.

Even if he hated himself fiercely and couldn't decide if the attempts on improvement was something worth the time and effort, even if one some days he hated Superman's resolve on getting him back into the battle, he had to admit that the young man was sort of a constant in his life that kept him going or at least surviving on worse days. As much as James wouldn't call it that, he was a closest thing to a friend he had after the fall of Atlas. But maybe the head-smart therapist was right and it was on him for closing off from people.

Yūki​. Superman didn't seem eager to share his actual name, but James picked a more fitting nickname and also a puzzle for the young man to decipher. He still called him per Superman, until he'd learn his real name, but he let this little token of appreciation slip once or twice. 優希. Maybe he couldn't see the light at the end of the road, but it was enough that someone else did.

"aren’t we all just devils trying to look like angels?"

Salem had the weirdest friends.

Come to that, before he showed up in the flesh, such as it was, Summer had figured Bill Cipher the Demonic Triangle probably wasn't real; God knew Salem spent long enough in isolation to lose her grip on reality now and then. Who was Summer to judge?

"I mean," Summer said, doing her level best to sound like she wasn't hurriedly rearranging that assumption, "devils and angels look a lot alike to begin with. Like if you asked the average man on the street how to tell 'em apart… I mean–"

She shrugged, hopping up on the circulation desk, and offered the bag of pretzels she'd been crunching on when Bill sailed in out of the ether. The campus library had an illustrated bestiary somewhere, if he wanted pictures.

"I often wake up at night, frightened with the understanding that there are things man shouldn't know."

"Well, the boundary between what we shouldn't know and what we do know is often, I find, regrettably permeable," Ozpin said with a trace of self-deprecation. More than a fair share of his own knowledge was forbidden, or at least inadvisable, in some way or another. "How does the saying go? Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we must either flee or go mad… Hm."

He paused, tipping his chin, to consider that he'd grown a tad hazy on what qualified as an idiomatic expression in this life.

"…In any case," he went on, curling both hands around the cardboard cup of tea he'd ordered a few minutes ago, "it seems to me that human curiosity is an incurable condition. Perhaps terminal. The heart wants what it wants."

The opaque grey veil of rain pouring down the cafe windows transformed the outside world into a wan mirror; Ozpin took care to avoid his reflection's eyes, though he was—for once—alone, except for the stinging cavity Isaac had left behind when the machine ripped him away. He exhaled softly.

"Flame is a question, and the moth always answers yes," he muttered. "I suppose there's not much to be done except live with ourselves." Ozpin winced, lifting his cup. "What sort of secrets haunt you, of late? I find myself plagued most often by terrible dreams of cities falling by the sky, and… other such tragedies wrought by mankind's hubris."

He cast a pointed glance toward the holoscreen mounted in the corner, upon which a reporter for the Atlas Daily had been burbling away for several minutes about the bold new plan to elevate Atlas to the clouds. It was only a pipe dream for now, but if the Council remained committed, Ozpin feared he might need to do something drastic to intervene. Like running for a seat himself, or applying himself to become the headmaster.

"i believe you. and i believe you'll be needing this."

Salem had dreamt of stranger things than this.

The air reeked of ozone. On the wind, an improbable medley of tearing metal and iron-shod hoofbeats. She stood within the eye of a storm—of a teeming faceless multitude of bodies, rushing past—knife-edged cobblestones under her feet, fanged towers of glass and steel ripping at the sky. Cerulean skin, torn, weeping the pitiless black of the abyssal night. Somewhere in the distance, a mournful sliver of music.

The intrusion of this… offensively yellow creature, however, inspired in her a visceral unease. Her eyes narrowed, and Salem gazed at him for a long while without blinking.

“You,” she said at last, “are not welcome here. I don’t presume good intentions from trespassers.” Her instinctual attempt to extirpate the invasive presence when she first felt it worming into her mind had failed, so utterly that she might as well have tried to stop a volcanic eruption with handfuls of snow. The pain hadn’t yet pierced her consciousness, but she knew it writhed in the deep.

One ice blue eye regarded the… sentient, glowing, floating triangle. What. The. Fuck. But they had seen many strange things, since falling through the Void into the Ever After, so this wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. Deciding that they had nothing better to do — their obligations regarding helping with the Atlesian refugees were finished for the day — Weiss turned toward the thing that had spoken to them.

Expression blank and hands in their pockets, the Hunter’s fox ears didn’t even so much as twitch; their tail also remained motionless, for now. “…That’s a rather forward question, for someone you haven’t even introduced yourself to,” they noted blandly, gaze shifting upward to the triangle’s top hat. As for their answer to question itself… Weiss wasn’t really sure of the answer, and so kept their thoughts to themself, for the moment.

Better to play this close to the chest.

“You can’t have it both ways.”

This.

Ozma examined the… thing… that had appeared beside them for a moment, face blank, before turning slowly to fix their eyes, once more, upon the fracture. It was the only other possible thing to look at in this infinite, empty threshold between life and death.

This might as well happen.

“If you’re referring to my being neither quite alive nor quite dead at the moment,” they said, “unfortunately, I can. Otherwise I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific than that.”

How long they’d been sitting with their arms crossed atop their knees before this—apparition crept in, Ozma couldn’t say. Time never seemed to mean anything here, and even if it did they had no way of keeping it.

It felt like a while. The fracture hadn’t yet widened enough to accommodate more than the thin golden chain of their abominable tether, which presently lazed like a basking serpent on the plane between themself and that hairline crack in all the white.