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| Nitrim's Apartments — Volkan, The Crescent |
| A small two-step set of stairs lead into this recessed room that is lit by hooded, indirect lighting that casts a somber, golden glow over its mostly red and black features. Various pieces of art, both photography and moving hypervisual, line the walls. Darkly shaded marble flooring stretches out to a small seating area with a pair of sofas in front of a mounted InfoSphere videoscreen that serves as the centerpiece of the room. To the left of the entryway is a comfortable chair seated next to a table and bookshelf that rest near a wide balcony that overlooks Volkan below. Along the far right wall is a snake habitat on a raised platform tht is protected by a mostly transparent energy shield.
The rear of the room supports another small two-stair reach that leads up to a lavish bedroom setting with a draped four-post bed in black and red dressing. Lastly, a small double door off to the side of the bedding section leads to a washroom with a walk-in shower and a large soaking tub set next to a window. |
| 26 August 3013 |
The rising of the sun over the horizon bleeds away the blood-red lighting in the private apartments of Nitrim Khournas. A line of golden light forms, casting heavy shadows over the walls that lowers and washes away the red as the minutes pass until the room is flooded with the sleepy, pale glow of morning light. The rear of the room, on the raised platform, is where a bed sits where two bodies tangled beneath the sheets start to stir as internal clocks and a change in the room's lighting forces their bodies to wake.
Pressed back-to-chest like a pair of failed and tattooed spoons, Nitrim Khournas' tattooed arm slips over the top of the sweat-soaked comforter to wrap around the body before him. Still rather unconcsious and lost to the world in a post-Red Eye haze, his fingers curl around the wrist he finds as he presses in closer, digging his body against the warmth that shares the bed with him.
Rook stirs faintly, everything is sweat and sleepiness, contentment and haziness. She doesn’t immediately register where she is, or who she is with, but the fingers around her wrist make her eyes flutter open. She looks down at the hand and it looks familiar, but the bedsheets do not. She slowly comes to a bit more, the edges of the Red Eye wearing off in her system faster than his, as she’s taken it for a lifetime. She sits up slowly, head spinning from dehydration, and rubs at her face with both hands, trying to focus.
The shifting of the bed as the body moves is more than enough to signal to Nitrim's brain that something has changed. His arm falls to dangle over Rook's lap as his own eyes crack open to see a wealth of naked spine and tattoo work, that for a moment, he has to place. Eyelids fluttering, he reaches out to press a fingertip to her spine before the pain starts to creep in at the corners of his eyes. A headache seeps its way in through behind his eat and he rolls over onto his back, bracing his forearm over his eyes. "Rook? That you?"
Rook blinks at the voice and she grunts out a quiet, "Yes," to Nitrim. "What happened?" she asks, before pulling the sheet up against her chest as she realizes she has no top on. Snippets of the night before creep back to her but only the briefest flashes. She lays back down into the nest of pillows, clutching the sheet, and turns her head to look at him.
As if to answer her question, Nitrim lowers his eyes to the sheets and lifts them. Beneath the darkness he can see that neither of them are wearing a stitch, with her leg a long span of naked flesh resting against his hip. "I don't know," he replies to her, dropping the sheet back down to his chest as he nestles back in against the pillows. "I don't feel like we did anything. You used to leave bruises and the walls are intact." A wry joke, though delivered dryly. "How do you feel? I ache…maybe…?"
"Feel like I dosed a while ago," Rook says quietly. She blinks then, and a memory flips over of her grabbing his wrist a moment too late. "Shit. You used my drops." She too checks under the sheet and confirms the lack of clothes. "Shit." She says it again just because.
"I know." Nitrim rasps quietly, rubbing his hand over the eye that has already started twitching. His words bear the weight of internal scarring, something broken that was once healed. He doesn't sound happy about it. With a sigh, he slides a hand over the sheets between them, feeling for clothes and signs of what they may have done. "I can't tell. I just can't." With a groan, he slips out of the bed and starts across the floor to his fridge, pulling out two bottles of water and slides a hip onto the bed. "How mad are you?"
Rook watches him as he goes to retrieve the water, trying to remember what happened after she dosed herself. There's a blank there at the moment. "Not mad," she murmurs. "Confused." She scrubs her hand down her face, her hair splayed out on the pillows as she stares at the ceiling. "Shouldn't have brought drops. My fault," she murmurs. She's feeling the jones-ing already, so they must have slept a long while. Usually she takes the drops a couple times a day.
Nitrim reaches out with the bottle, tapping it gently against her side above the blankets to get her attention. Handing it off to her, he cracks open his own bottle and dips it back. He guzzles, his body screaming for much needed resources that he's lost during a night he can't remember. He sets the mostly-empty bottle aside and lays down beside her. "I'm an adult, Rook, don't blame yourself. Whatever happened last night, its nothing neither of us — I think we just did the red," Nitrim's words drastically change course as he turns his eyes to her face. "Confused?"
"Yes." Comes Rook’s response. "Why did you take them?" she asks, taking the offered water and sipping from the bottle. "You were doing good. Off them. Clear of them. Free." She grimaces. "Lucky."
"There's no good answer to that, never has been." Nitrim says to her before he quiets, focusing his eyes on a far-off spot along the wall. The weight of what he has done starts to constrict around him and in a moment of discomfort he slides off of the bed. He scrubs his hands over his face and slips into his massive washroom. The faucet turns on, and he looks over the basin to splash water into his face and get a better look at himself. He stops to stare, eyebrows lowering at the frown he wears.
Rook downs more of her water before she slides out of the bed, finding the tanktop she’d been wearing on the floor, tossed out in the middle of the night when the drops made her overheat. She moves to her pack, already having the twitching start, and the shakes creeping in. She opens it and rifles through it, looking for her drops. "Where are they?" she mutters.
"I don't know." Nitrim murmurs, probably all-too-quietly for suspicion's sake before he leans back and nudges the bathroom door closed. The door glides closed with a thud and he turns back to the water, splashing it over his face until his cheeks grow numb with the heat. Gasping out his held breath, he turns to the shower with twitching fingers, yanking open the large, glass door.
Rook dumps the meager contents of her backpack out on his table, rifling through them for any sign of her drops. Not there. She digs through the bed pillows and under the sheets, the couch cushions, even the fridge trying to find them. Nothing. Whatever noise she was making, stops after a while.
Stopping at the shower, Nitrim lowers his head and listens to the sound of Rook's thrashing through his room. He presses his forehead into the cool metal of the corners of his shower door. "Come in here!" He calls out to her. "I don't know where it is, I think it's all gone, Rook. I'll — get more after we get cleaned up." For her, for him, or both he doesn't specify.
Rook pushes open the door and she isn’t looking to good. She burns up the drug much faster than an average user, and without it bad things happen to her. She is shaking badly, as if she’s freezing, as if the depletion of the heat from the Red Eye has sucked out all of her warmth. She has her arms wrapped around herself as she limps into the bathroom unsteadily.
Not that there was much color in Nitrim's face to begin with this morning, but what is left of it drains at the sight of her. Clenching his fist against his forehead to quell his own withdrawal shakes, he steps over to Rook and wraps his arm around her. "You don't have any more? Fuck. Fucking Six." He mumbles as he guides her into the shower. With trembling hands, he presses the knob and a blast of freezing cold water sprays over the both of them.
Rook lets out a scream when the cold water hits her. Her teeth chatter and her lips begin turning blue from the cold as she huddles against him. She can’t speak, but she clenches his arm with one hand. Her teeth grit as she tries to raise her awakened powers and her eyes go white. Her voice is in his head then. May need doctor.
Doctor? Doctor? Rook if we — FUCK Nitrim's fingers clench into hers as he tightens against her, holding them both down against the spray of water. Aura flashing, he reaches up with his senses to turn the knob to a warmer setting as his teeth begin to chatter, too. Are you sure? I will but…are you SURE you're in trouble?
That’s when Rook’s aura winks out and her eyes roll back in her head. She begins to seize and goes limp in his arms, unable to hold up her own weight as every limb rattles like a window in a thunderstorm.