genessia | [closed] silence is broken

Entry tags:

[closed] silence is broken

Who: Szelhamos and Tannusen
Where: Genessia City - Velvet Lust
When: Backdated to the heeeaaaatwaaaave.
What: Szel's been actively avoiding talking to Tannu, while still hanging around his bar, since the soul incident.
Warnings: Talk of old abuse.

After the first time Tannusen had approached the demon and Szel had literally just poofed away in a cloud of smoke, the tiger had backed off. Plenty of reasons ran through his head why the man may not want to deal with him directly anymore, and... well, he couldn't blame him.

Tannusen just went about business as usual, lounging around in his usual upstairs booth sipping tea. His legs were on the seat itself while his back was against the wall the booth stood beside, and he was actively doing something or other on a laptop on his lap. Reading, mostly. And sometimes a lot of typing.

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And ye gods almighty was it hot out.

Just hot enough... for Szel to take off the blazer. Just barely. Still a bit crisp out for him but hey, it was better than it usually was.

Which was why he was here, at the bar, as he always was, sans blazer. That nice dress shirt was still on of course, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, the buttons at the very top undone just enough to let some air flow. Barely enough to even show the top of his collarbone.

No tie.

And currently hovering around just a touch closer to Tannusen's booth than he had in several weeks.

Well. Tannusen paused his typing to look Szel over, since the demon was conveniently nearby for once. And not dressed completely like a funeral home director? Even more to look at!

Undoubtedly much to Cassian's annoyance, the tiger barely seemed to have noticed the heat wave. His only concession to it was that he was in jeans and a t-shirt more often during this, rather than his three-piece suits. Dressed like the biker he was, kevlar-reinforced jeans and leather steel toe boots weren't exactly cooling, but hey. If it worked in southern Mexico, it worked here just fine!

"Hi, Szel." Time for another poof of smoke and a quick escape?

Yes, get a good look, he's actually showing some fucking skin for once, wonder of wonders.

Oh but it was still pretty much business here with that look, leather shoes and silk. What wasn't business as usual was how he actually reacted to the greeting. Not just by poofing away, no.

"So you're not rotting from the inside out anymore." As dry and bitter as the words came across as, there was a running undercurrent of relief in the tone. The 'stitches' had taken.

"Good, I didn't want to have to deal with some angry albino midget storming the fortress and screaming for a week."

The 'stitches' had taken, yes. And the corrupted black threads of it were bleeding out into the surrounding soul, being absorbed over time.

Tannusen was a creature far more malleable to change than any angel or demon or human. That soul of his was adapting; harvesting the foreign material and making it do... something, slowly. Too gradual, and at too early a stage to tell what it was doing, but it was definitely doing something.

It might have been an interesting experiment just for the sake of curiosity, had the subject been less... liked.

"Oh, and words?" Yes, Tannusen was going to point out the lack of awkward fleeing. Because he was a cat, and cats were all assholes. "My goodness, what will people think?"

"Oh don't you even start." Mostly because he doesn't... wanna... talk about the running away thing.

Shut up, you stupid cat.

"I wasn't vanishing due to public opinion, since when have I done anything with someone elses feelings in mind?"

Other than Tannusen.

"Oh, so you admit you were running away, then," Tannusen chuckled at that, and picked his tea up from the table to take a drink, his other hand still resting on the laptop currently trying to cook his thighs. Heat wave? What heat wave?

He was a Bengal fucking tiger.

"What changed? I'm no less... whatever, than a week ago. I'm sure you saw all sorts of delightful bits of what makes me tick."

He didn't know exactly what Szel had seen. But. He'd seen Szel's reaction to it. Heard it, too.

"I'd fuck off too if I had the option."

A lie, of course, but he was still a pooka.

There's a rather strangled sound. A cross between an attempt to say NO and the instant cutting off of it before it actually became a word because lying about that now would be just a little too stupid.

"Nothing changed." For Tannusen, at least. Szel had a lot of thinking to do.

"I just wanted to make sure you weren't dead. It's professional."

Two liars walk into a bar.

"Ah, well," Tannusen sounded a little vague; distracted as he turned his attention back to his laptop screen, and the rapid-fire clickity-clickity click-clack-clack click was definitely the typing of someone used to keyboards. "Now you know."

Uh.

No.

Nope sorry, he's here and even though he doesn't have a fucking clue what to talk about, you don't just piddle around on a computer while he's there.

So he's not sorry, but that screen might just be going mysteriously black as the processor makes a sound like a bag of popcorn in the microwave.

"Rude."

"I'll say, did you just pop my computer?"

SUPER RUDE, SZEL.

Tannusen closed the lid on the defunct machine; he'd heather balm it later to get it back. "I thought you were just making sure I wasn't dead. Would you like to take my vitals too, doctor?"

"You can't prove I did it, maybe it was just a terrible computer."

Stop looking at weird porn, it's all your fault clearly.

"I put your soul back together with shreds of my own personal being, first of all. Second, I show up looking absolutely perfect and you're more interested in a computer."

Well, honesty is the best policy right.

"The least you could do is give a compliment."

"Well, you've been extremely interested in not hearing much of anything, from me," Tannusen set the little machine onto the table. Szel had claimed nothing had changed, which to Tannusen meant he was still supposed to leave the spider alone. "But yes, you dress-down nicely. I suppose this 'heat wave' everyone is complaining about must suit you."

"I was working on something."

Specifically working on thinking of what the hell to say. About everything.

About what he saw.

If he should say anything at all. Honestly, it didn't seem like something that would be quite appropriate being brought up in a public place off handedly.

'By the way, what was with all that past abuse lol' seemed like a shitty thing to say.

"I don't have to hear anything if I saw half of it."

"You were working on something... in my bar, where if I got a little too close to your seat you poofed out like a cartoon character leaving a person-shaped dust cloud behind?"

Tannusen didn't bother to not sound skeptical, there.

"Ah, yes. I figured by your reaction that you saw quite a lot. I didn't see any of it."

But he'd seen Szel. Yes indeed. He'd seen how he'd reacted, and he doubted very much it was Dakshin Rai's atrocities that had been causing such a stir in the seraph as to make him try to sing for him.

Edited 2017-07-16 06:54 (UTC)

"Excuse you." Asshole.

"I know this is going to astound you but sometimes I like to say things that aren't tailor made to hurt feelings. Don't even tell me you don't have any, you and I both know that is a massive cesspit of bullshit."

He's allowed to lie all day about feelings though.

"I saw a lot yes." A beat, as he pulled his thoughts together.

"It's why I left, but not for the reasons I know you're telling yourself. You're not disgusting.

... Like that.

You can be, but that has less to do with your past and more to do with you giving me 3 AM booty calls."

"Oh, like you didn't end up enjoying yourself too, that time," Tannusen chuckled.

Look at that deflection. Look at it, blind guy.

"And I am."

Disgusting.

"I figured you'd seen it and cottoned on in a way Cass never will."

"We're not talking about that, that was an example of the type of disgusting you are."

Gross.

"It's a very common type of gross that most surface dwelling beings of actual flesh and blood are, congratulations. You're almost normal."

Anyway.

"Situations beyond your control however do not make you disgusting."

"..." Tannusen was quiet, losing much of the polish that Szel couldn't see anyway, gaze dropping down and to the side, to his own hand on the table.

"... It's like assuming you're trash because someone set your house on fire. Maybe, just maybe, the person who set your house on fire is a garbage person, and you were but one of a hundred other people who've had their house set on fire, and they're wrong.

And you didn't do anything to deserve it.

Sometimes, people are horrible, terrible, garbage people to people who don't deserve it.

The universe is a bleak, dismal, callous machine that doesn't care who or what it chews up as it forges ahead, and plenty of perfectly good, perfectly innocent, perfectly wonderful people get devoured and shat back out, Tannusen.

You're going to be married to someone who I know would agree with me."

Yeah, yeah he knows. Of course he knows.

"Probably because he has personal experience in the matter."

"I could have run away sooner. I could have killed him."

Tannusen spoke almost too quietly to be heard over the loud club around them.

"But I liked it."

"You could have set everything on fire, cannibalized half the population and carved someone's skull into a fashionable drinking glass, since we're on the topic of could haves.

You could have also been a child in the middle of no where with no where to run, no one else to take care of you and burdened with the knowledge that if you'd skipped off you would have been dragged kicking and screaming back to the fold for a doubly worse time, still within the area of could haves.

You could have been trying to stay alive.

I've never really met someone who chewed their consensual fuck partners face off because they just liked the sex so much."

Happy kids also didn't try to carve their own heart out, panicking because the knife slipped, grinding and scraping against their own breast bone... making a mess. Failing.

Tannusen had gone quiet again, staring at his own hand on the table once more. The ring on it felt heavy; how could he possibly be worth Cassian's time...

This was becoming increasingly frustrating. It was impossible for Szel to separate the two of them, not after what he knew now.

The insinuation that anything was liked was-

Offensive. Deeply, stupidly, horrifically offensive and it was taking a lot of self control to not lunge at the table and grab Tannusen by his shirt collar.

"It's amazing what the threat of worse things can do for your staying power when your life is already shit."

Tannusen didn't blame other victims for what had happened to them.

Only himself. Only ever himself. He'd been thoroughly brainwashed, and it had never worn off.

That was why he needed 'maintenance', and Szel, so far as Tannusen knew, did not.

"...Yeah," the tiger cleared his throat, still staring at that ring. He slid his legs off the bench and sat up properly, at least, reaching for his tea. "You gonna sit down, or is this just a drive-by 'hey I know you're crazy' and then poof?"

Maintenance happened in other shapes and forms.

Locking himself in the library for weeks on end without food or drink or conversation, or maybe storming through the fortress looking for less loyal demons to rip apart.

That was maintenance. A violent reassertion of control. He was in charge, he made the rules, he could do whatever he pleased.

With that, he did sit. Hurled himself into the seat, a flash of wings flying this way and that before they vanished once more into nothing.

"You're possibly the most annoying person I have ever met in my entire life, and that includes your fiance."

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