Ventis, Prince of Song
He/Him
25
November 6th
Fallarbor
Bisexual
Idol
Grunt
you sell yourself for a dream, they're never quite what they seem
TAG WITH @cartier
KLAUS CARTIER
celebritea [c]
POSTED ON Nov 28, 2022 17:09:51 GMT
The irony isn't lost on him. Forced to hide if he wants a moment's peace, all Klaus has really done is trade one cage for another. But this one's gilded and that should mean something, shouldn't it? Klaus meets Elijah's gaze, expression hard and unreadable, as if daring him to point out the obvious. To point out the vines all around them. The fans in the alley just beyond the stall, still on the hunt for someone that Klaus can't bring himself to be right now. To say it with more than just his eyes and break the spell, pull him back from the brink of exposure. Klaus doesn't realize how tense he's let himself get until Elijah speaks. He's not going to say it. Something in Klaus uncoils. He'd been expecting a dig, finds himself at a loss when it doesn't come. Instead, he laughs, for once not unkindly. "Needy and bitch are the last two words I'd use to describe you." Which is probably about as close as Klaus is going to get to a compliment. "Short-sighted, maybe. Stubborn, definitely."
There's another word on the tip of his tongue, one with fewer edges, one that doesn't feel safe. Klaus stifles it. He's not about to put himself out there like a fucking sap just because Elijah didn't jump at the chance to drag him while he was down. Instead, he wonders if he should apologize the way everyone else seems to when they find out that someone else is alone in the world. Ventis would have done that, played at sympathy. Told Elijah that he was making his family proud, honoring their legacy or some shit. And maybe he was, but what the fuck did Klaus know about honoring family legacies and whatever it was that Elijah's family's might have wanted for him or done to him in their quest for it? It's easier to seize on the other part, even if it means that the ball's back in his court. "I never said it was," he says tersely. It hadn't all been bad. The pokemon had been kind to him, letting him curl up in the stable with them whenever it was better not to be in the house, and drift off to the smell of hay and animal musk, even if he usually paid for it in the morning. Waking late with school on the horizon and no time for a shower. That had caused it's own problems. No, it's not that Klaus hates the idea of farming itself, not exactly, but some part of him will always be the young boy staring up at this father, face streaked with ash and mud, blood leaking from a split in his lip, whenever he thinks of a farmer's life. Dirt streaked hands and a ruddy face. Dwindling cash and rage. Desperation born of bad weather, too much ash, not enough rain. "The ash from Mt. Chimney's good for the soil," he says, a pointless bit of trivia meant to distance himself from all the rest of it, from the pull of memory. It's the sort of thing that Ventis, Prince of Song shouldn't know. "You don't have to fertilize as much."
It's only when he sees the calculating look on Elijah's face that he realizes what he's given away. A farming town on the edge of Mt. Chimney, that definitely narrowed things down a fair bit. Maybe if he finds something to distract the other man his misstep will be overlooked. Forgotten. "So," he says, sliding down off the counter and gesturing to the stall's various trappings, "how much of this is you, and how much is tradition?"
|
|