=> PHERES: Abscond.

[refiningspacetime]

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> FLEETBOUND POST. [refiningSpacetime - FIN]
=> MARDUK: Call your guide. [FIN]
=> RICCIN: Retrieve the damsel in distress. [FIN]
=> HINNOM: Lead him home. [FIN]
=> FLEETBOUND POST. [activatingAggro- FIN]
=> SIPARA: Fetch your dumb moirail. [FIN]
=> PHERES: Wake up. [FIN]
 

SUMMARY: Taking drinks from strangers is generally a bad idea. Pheres needs to be picked up from a party, but life is hard when your moirail is out of town and all of your friends are terrible. Luckily, there's always Fleetbound!

WARNINGS: None! Except for Pheres being thoroughly depressing in Lead him home.

THIS HAS BEEN FINALLY EDITED. For like the third time. Due to POV-switching shenanigans, you may occasionally encounter weird shifts / incorrect verb pluralisation at points that I missed in switching from 3rd person to 2nd person POV. Sorry! :c

For the most part, though, typoes should be fixed and continuity is now more accurate!

ALSO:  Follow the story through the links above to ensure you're reading the correct, edited threads, please and thank youu

Comments

[pheres is drunk and sad and full of issues] [but he's still got energy to judge] [:(]

[refiningspacetime]

That's it, he's decided: he's going to die down here. The thought should be more depressing, but when he turns it over in his head, there's only a sense of grudging acceptance.

This is what he deserves, probably.

Pheres lives like all the feeds say that redbloods should: he keeps himself in his cart, with his books and his taxidermy, and he works. When he deals with others, he's well-dressed, docile, and helpful to the higher castes: in short, he's respectable.

In short, he acts as he ought to, and for the most part, it works out. When things go wrong - when a customer tries to cull him, or a deal goes badly - well, it's because he slipped, made a comment he shouldn't have. Wore the wrong clothes. When he behaves properly, it works.

It doesn't earn him much respect, no matter how polite he is. It doesn't get him many friends. But he's never died, and it's only when he decides to go out, live a little, and act like everyone else - immoral, disrespectful, churlish - that he ever seems to come close.

(Even now, he knows that's not precisely right. Most of the time, he's gone out and come hive the next evening or by midnight at the latest: embarrassed, maybe, but perfectly fine.)

(But he's bleeding on a sewer floor, in the one place that his moirail would never think to look to retrieve him, and that means he's going to die here alone, where his body will be eaten by squeakbeasts and grubs. Right now, the gloomy thoughts feel right, and that's all that matters.)

He gives up on staying upright, and curls up on the ground, his horn scraping against the concrete. His eyes are so heavy, and all he wants to do is sleep, and Hinnom is gone, and he can't walk any further.

So he closes them, and he lets the darkness settle in.

[postalprestidigitation]

Pheres has curled into a ball, like a grub ready to die. By the time Castor gets to him, his breathing has slowed, but he's not dead. Just asleep, on the concrete floor splattered with his fluids.

Ze tries not to gag as Castor bends down next to him and picks him up, careful as he sometimes carries Hinnom. Ze can feel the rasp and slide of Pheres's weight against his telekinesis as Castor returns, but thankfully, not too well: it's Castor controlling it with the ease of sweeps of practice, and the sensation is like touching bone through flesh.

"You'll have to play look-out today," Castor warns zim. "But we won't go deep, just to the pipe."

Hinnom bobs their head in a nod, but they can't help the dubious look they shoot towards Pheres's horns. He might be able to fit, even with his dumbo shoulders, but his rack is kinda huge.

Oh, well. If they won't fit, Castor can always snap one off.

[postalprestidigitation]

In the end, Pheres gets to keep his horns. Going up the pipe takes the velvet off the sides of his bottom set, leaving maroon streaks on the metal behind, but Hinnom goes up first, and between zir pulling and Castor's pushing, they manage to get him into the hive proper.

Hinnom's hive is the old catacomb where they first found Castor, back when ze'd been nameless and small and fresh from the caverns. They'd thought it safe, because his presence had kept away ghost and the walking dead alike, and ze'd never expected to find the source.

His presence still keeps the dead away, and sweeps and sweeps of work have replaced doors, set locks, and made it thoroughly impenetrable to the living, as well. The walls are padded with fabric, and anything and everything ze's salvaged from the catacombs over the years: a few things from the culling pits, where the bodies used to be dumped and burned, but mostly gifts left behind for the ghosts in the sweeps after.

Recently, ze's set up a ruperacoon that Castor found above-ground, and helped zim haul down. Hinnom doesn't like to use it, after sweeps of sleeping dry, but the slime helps when ze's injured or sick, and so it only makes sense to dump Pheres in.

Ze curls up around the outside. Castor's use of zir telekinesis always makes zim tired, and now that ze's in the safety of zir hive, it's turned into outright exhaustion.

"Gonna sleep," Hinnom tells Castor, and ze doesn't even have to ask: he drapes them with one of the shrouds off of the wall, a nice, thick one they stole from a seadweller's bonerest, and that tiny use of telekinesis uses what feels like zir last drop of energy.

Ze sleeps.

---

> PHERES: WAKE UP.