ofcatsandfate | Your sacred stars won't be guiding you. {Open}

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Your sacred stars won't be guiding you. {Open}

Fabrice is daydreaming, leaning against his study window, absentmindedly stroking Clotho as thoughts drift through his mind, each one inevitably drifting back to Demetri, and even Daniel, and how utterly perceptive he had proven to be in seeing right through him. The sun is just beginning to set, fading light giving way to the whims of the stars. He bears a half smile on his face as he continues to stare out at a world he just barely acknowledges. He feels almost at peace with his life, for a change.

This is, of course, when the pain strikes him, abrupt and powerful enough as though a fist landed square on his chest, sending him stumbling against the wall and the cat to leap from his grasp with a wounded meow.

“Fuck,” he gasps, his scars blazing as though the increasing evening had set them on fire. His breaths come in ragged waves as he tries to keep himself upright; images, like those of his previous visions, flicker through his mind like lightning, fleeting, but leaving enough of an impression that Fabrice begins to piece together the meaning behind them.

A woman, elegant and with the eyes of a bird of prey, flashes of silver on her wrists as she pins him to the ground. She mutters words, ugly, brutal words that keep him from struggling. He sees his father pulled underneath the sea by a ferocious wave; later, his uncle faces the same fate. But he knew that already, he thinks; he lost two people to the ocean in tragic accidents. A feeling of dread settles over him as he comes to realize (again) that the woman is the connection between them. And yet, he still cannot make out her face.

He stumbles around in a trance, and before he realizes it, he walks out of his door as though pulled along by a string. Images continue to cloud his thoughts as he stumbles into Siren Cove, his clothes torn as he meanders through patches of bramble. He barely avoids getting hit by a car, angry owner blaring at him with his horn and curse words that fall on ears not listening. Again, he sees those wrists encircled by silver, glowing purple as they hold him down and dig deep into his chest.

He only stops when he reaches a side street, Maple Road, he thinks, possibly. It’s only a few streets away from his aunt Violet’s house, and as he blinks himself into a state of greater awareness, he wonders what this road has to do with anything.

And then, the penny drops. He sees the woman’s face, the coldness in her eyes and the familiarity of her make-up and hair. She once held him on her knee, back when he thought she was still capable of love. Aunt Violet, the head of the Coombs family, had murdered her brother and her husband; she’d tried to kill him, too.

It’s too much to bear, and Fabrice begins to shake, still in pain as his scars appear to throb from the memory of the attacks. He thinks he might have taken his phone out to text someone, a simple message of 'help,' but he can't be sure. His entire body trembles as he attempts to steady his breathing, as tears burn at the edge of his vision and his hands clench into fists. He feels as though he’s actually been stabbed, the way the doctors had said. The lie that, he finds, is far preferable than the actual truth.

OOC: More information about what's going on with Fabrice can be found in this post. This will be one of those wibbly wobbly RP things where multiple people can find Fabrice on the side of the road. This post is open forever, just wanted to get it up while I have Internet. Any other questions, let me know!

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She's on her way home from the school when she sees a dark shape huddled on the ground, just near her house. She heads towards it immediately, her first thought being that its one of the homeless community. She'll bring them inside for a coffee and the couch, if they'll take it, she's decided, but by the time she gets closer, she realises how wrong she is.

Her cousin and her have never been particularly close - that was always Moira. She's always felt a bit like they didn't want much to do with her or her family - again, bar Moira, but everyone has always loved Moira - and she had tried to respect that and keep her distance.

Now though, it all goes out the window. Fabrice is lying on the pavement, huddled and shaking, and she can feel the magic on him before she kneels beside him.

"Fabrice?" She questions, a note of panic in her voice. His clothes are practically torn from his skin and through the tears in the fabric, she can see deep, darp scars that look like they're pulsing. She knows it's dark magic without needing to have ever seen it before. She can't wrap her head around who in this town would do such a thing - one of the new witches? But why? Fabrice wouldn't hurt a fly, there's no way he's managed to get on someone's bad side so quickly.

Rushed, she starts drawing protection runes around them both, before she focuses on his wounds. Here, she's more careful, tracing the lines of a simple healing rune deliberately and delicately, nothing like the sloppy shapes she's just placed on the ground around them. It's not enough to help him completely, but its enough that she knows he'll survive until she finds more help.

"Fabrice, stay with me, okay?" She whips out her phone and dials Moira. Her sister always knows what to do.

Fabrice starts abruptly when he realizes he is suddenly no longer alone. He turns to find his cousin, Amelie, standing over him, drawing various runes around them both in the air. Her magic sends warmth through him, helps ease the ache of his old scars; he is able to breathe more easily, able to sit up and realize, in his panic, he has all but torn his shirt from his body.

"Amelie?" His voice feels as broken as the rest of him as he tries to take in the scene around him. He can't stop shivering, or keep the tears from falling from his eyes.

He has always been closest with Moira, out of all of his cousins, but he still has always cared for the twins, even if he might not always know how to approach them. He is so grateful for Amelie here with him now, he can't help but throw himself on her, hugging her with what remains of his strength.

Amelie returns the hug tightly, pulling him in to her and cradling his head. "It's going to be okay, I've got you," she says quietly.

There are a thousand questions running through her head about who did this to him and why, and how what look like old wounds seem to be flaring up and hurting him so much, and why he's out here in the street alone. Quickly, she tugs off her coat and wraps it around him, doing her best to cover his small frame, including the scars. What had happened to his shirt?

"I'll help get you inside, okay? You can stay with me if you like." Questions can wait until she knows he's safe.

Edited 2014-07-01 20:18 (UTC)

He keeps gasping into the crook of Amelie's neck, trying to calm himself down as he feels ablaze with physical and emotional pain. All he can think about are the images all but burned into his mind, his aunt's grim expression as she sends first his father, and then his uncle, to their deaths. He feels so small as Amelie cradles him; he doesn't know what to do, how to tell her what he knows deep in his bones to be the truth.

Then she offers to bring him inside, and he lifts his head, shaking it violently as his shivers increase.

"No, no I can't," he pleads, voice wracked with fears and doubts. "Not in the same house as..." he gulps, hardly daring to even mouth her name. Still, it eventually comes out, like all ugly truths do. "Not with Violet."

She doesn't know what's gotten into him - they spent plenty of summers in this house, but she nods anyway and hugs him tighter.

"Okay, not in the house. Come on, we'll get a hotel for the night, okay? I'll stay with you."

Moira doesn't seem to be answering, so she gives up and dials her driver instead. It doesn't take long before he's rolling to a halt beside them, concern on his face as he peers out the window.

"We need somewhere to stay the night, Jude," she tells him hurriedly, helping Fabrice into the backseat before she climbs in next to him.

Fabrice just nods at her suggestion; it's not Coombs manor, a cursed estate now filled only with memories that haunt him, and that's all that matters to Fabrice.

"Okay," he mutters at last, as Amelie helps him into the backseat of a car. He remembers Jude, he thinks briefly, before his thoughts resume to focusing on getting the hell away from this place as fast as possible.

He sort of slumps in the backseat of the car, still holding on to Amelie for support.

"She killed them," he murmurs, tears still falling in time with his words. "She killed them and she tried to kill me."

This is more than she expected, and she does her best not to appear visibly shaken so as not to upset Fabrice further.

"Who hurt you, Fabrice?" She almost doesn't want to ask, but she does anyway.

Fabrice winces, both wanting to tell her and wanting to protect her from the truth now eating away at his own heart. He recalls suddenly that Moira already knows, and he wonders how she lives with the truth of knowing her mother's capabilities and the extent to which she has wielding them for her own personal gain. And Amelie still doesn't know; he wants to keep her from knowing, preserve her innocence from the harsh reality of their family name. But it wouldn't be right to do so; he knows this. He cannot keep the truth from someone who might be in danger of incurring Violet's wrath beneath her own roof.

He takes a long, shaky breath, though it does little to calm him or stop him from shaking.

"Your mother," he whispers, his voice harsh and ragged. "Violet."

In all honesty, she doesn't know whose name she had been expecting, but it's certainly not that one. She feels like she's been rocked to her core, but the more she thinks about it, she wonders whether she always knew her mother was capable of something like this.

No, she tells herself. No. Her mother can be awful, that much has never been in doubt. She expects too much and she's too hard and sometimes the way she looks at her makes Amelie want the ground to swallow her but killing someone is an entirely different ballgame.

"Are... Are you sure?" she asks pathetically, because it's easier than having to deal with what he's telling her. "Why would she... She wouldn't, I mean." She pauses, wracking her brain. Why on Earth would her mother have any reason to hurt her own family? "Why would she do this?" she asks, and she can feel her voice cracking, but she tries not to let it show. Fabrice needs her in a right frame of mind - they still need to get home and she probably needs to get him medical attention, and how can she be expected to think and be responsible when her own mother... She can't even finish the thought.

Fabrice can see it in her face and he winces, the guilt of being the one to tell her building upon the fear and hurt he already finds himself burdened with. He hates that he's told her such a thing about her own mother; he wouldn't admit to it if it weren't true, but that still doesn't lessen how awful he feels for accusing Amelie's mother of murder and violence to her face.

Her voice cracks and something breaks inside of him. He shuts his eyes as if that might shut out the world and the horrible realization he has just come to in regards to his part of it.

"I can see her face, clear as day," he says, his voice hushed. "I can still feel her hands holding me down and...clawing at me." He keeps his eyes closed, unable to look at Amelie. "I remember realizing she killed my dad and yours, the day before mother and I came over for dinner that night she...attacked me."

"I don't know," his own voice cracks, and he opens his eyes to pull Amelie closer to him. "I don't know."

The attack on Fabrice is one thing, and as awful as she feels about it, it's nothing compared to the mention of her father. She flinches, hard, and it's like she's been physically slapped.

"My dad died in an accident," she says, and if the words come out a little harsh, she doesn't mean them to. She's glad, suddenly, that the partition is up and Jude can't hear the conversation happening in the backseat. "She told me, she told us all, he..." she can feel tears threatening and she pushes them back. She can still remember the last time he smiled at her, and if she thinks about her mother being the one to destroy it all, to rip their family apart at the seams...

Surreptitiously, she checks his head for any wounds. Concussion, maybe, he's not talking sense. But the wounds are there, and he says he saw her face. What else doesn't she know? "Fabrice..." her fingers are turning white with how tight she's holding him, like if she lets go she'll let go of herself, too. "I'm so sorry."

The thing is, Fabrice knows how terrible it sounds, a woman murdering both her husband and her brother. And he has very little evidence to back it up, except what Moira's told him about her mother casting a glamour to make her appear to be crying at the funeral of Fabrice's father. But then, he remembers, vividly, the tipping for him, what made him entirely trust in Moira's theory in the first place. The flash of his father's boat keys, laying on Violet's kitchen counter the night before the funeral. The way that, when he'd touched them, those keys, he'd seen flashes of his father writhing like a worm caught on a hook before going still.

The way, years later, those same keys showed him images of his uncle undergoing the same, horrifying experience.

He flinches when Amelie snaps at him, though the reaction doesn't surprise him. "No," he shakes his head, hating every moment of this. "No he didn't."

She's holding him tightly, to the point where her grip hurts him a little, but he doesn't protest, not when he's hurting her with his words. "I am too," he tells her, unable to move, unable to do more and wishing he could.

All she can think is how much she can't go back to that house, not now, maybe not ever. They've arrived in front of a hotel and she wonders vaguely whether she could just stay here until she works out what to do, but she doesn't have enough money of her own and her mother would ask questions if she dipped into her trust.

The night is enough for now she decides, and she helps bundle Fabrice out of the car before leaning her head back in the window to swear Jude to secrecy. He's always had a soft spot for her and she knows it'll stick.

"Come on, let's get you inside."

Fabrice vaguely recognizes the hotel they've pulled into, a fairly decent looking place, though not particularly memorable; catching sight of the name, he forgets it almost as soon as he reads it. But that's fine, he thinks, as Amelie steers him inside. He's not at Violet's house, and that's what he cares about more than anything else.

"Okay," he tells his cousin as they head into the lobby, a thankfully empty appearing lobby, he notices. "This looks nice."

He feels as though he's been drugged, disoriented as he is from the pain and the weight of his visions. His chills have abated somewhat, though he still shakes with every step he takes.

She does her best to help him to the room she books out for them at the front desk, mindful that he barely seems to be able to walk. Gently, she starts drawing a quick calming rune on his back with her finger as they walk, though she feels like she needs one for herself at this rate.

Eventually, she manages to get them to a room, and Fabrice to a bed. "Sorry. It's not much, but this will have to do for tonight. Are you going to be okay?"

He leans on her most of the way to the room, still dizzy and dazed by his recent realizations. He's grateful for Amelie for bringing them to this hotel, as much as he might miss his cats and the comforts of his own home. He's too exhausted to bring himself back there now, as they make their way to the room.

He feels her place a comforting rune on his back, and he offers her a small smile in return, as much as he can manage for the moment.

He curls into himself on the bed instinctively, clutching the blankets around him as if they might erase this whole, hellish night.

"I'm...going to be as okay as I can be," he tells her. "What about you?"

Once he's safely tucked in bed, she hunkers down in a nearby armchair, hugging her knees up to her chin.

"I don't know," she says honestly. All she can think is that she wishes Aoife were here to help make sense of everything.

Fabrice knows he isn't going to sleep. He feels the shock of tonight in his bones, an emptiness that still resonates like electricity as he tries to bury himself in the blankets of his bed. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees hers, cold, dark, and full of the evil that killed those he loved.

"I'm sorry," he tells her. He doesn't know what else to say. Guilt that he's ruined her life makes his breathes as unsteady as the trembling still running through his body.

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Your sacred stars won't be guiding you. {Open}

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