abraxaslogs | I don't trust, but I see right in front of me

He slides into a chair across from Wilhelm in the dining hall, familiar enough by now for it to not be unusual, but Lucifer doesn't have a plate of food and instead tosses the boy a badly-wrapped package that thunks quite loudly on the table by his own plate. It's got a loose piece of thin fabric surrounding it with a cord awkwardly securing it.

"Congrats on surviving here a year," he says as way of explanation.

If Wilhelm opens it, he'll likely be put out because it is just the turtle crystal replica that they were all given for helping the beached turtle, lightning dancing inside of it. Only, Wilhelm might be able to feel something different on the underside of it, and if he flips it over he'll see an array of carefully etched symbols on the bottom.

Wilhelm looks up with a grin, also familiar enough by now. His expression twists funny as Lucifer tosses the package over to him, as if to ask what the hell is this? Of course, the quickest way to answer that question is to pull it open.

"Thanks," he tosses back before he even knows what it is.

When the bit of fabric falls away to reveal the little crystal turtle inside, he's not put out at all. Curiosity lights his face as he lifts it up for examination. Wilhelm hadn't joined the expedition to rescue the turtle. Everybody had already found a group, it seemed, and he was reluctant to advertise the fact that he might actually be a loser.

"Cool." This pronouncement is for the lightning crackling within the turtle's crystal body. Then he finds the marks etched onto the bottom. "What are these for?"

They remind him, in intention if not shape, of Wanda's runes, which he'd once carefully copied onto a scrap of paper and kept in his pocket. It's still floating around in a jacket or pair of pants somewhere. He's reassured to rediscover it every now and then.

"It's something I've been working on. That's the best I've got out so far." The studying of Academic magic has taken more time than he expected it would, but he's also been trying to learn two aspects of Enchantment spells and shoving them together so that he can later, down the road, adapt them again.

"It can't do a lot, but it might save your life in a pinch. You put your thumb over the symbol and speak the incantation," he says the word only when he's sure Wilhelm isn't about to repeat it with his thumb in position. Some Abraxan form of the word 'protect'. He thinks it was Ancient Thornean but they weren't about teaching language on top of spells in the classes.

"It'll give you a brief, lightning-pulse personal shield. Lasts ehhh..." he wobbles a hand, "about fifteen seconds, or until it soaks an impact." So run after, basically. "Takes about a day to recharge."

He explains that the lightning dance within the turtle itself has absolutely no bearings on the shield enchantment, he just thought it was funny. That lightning still needs to restore itself in a thunderstorm. It was far too complicated for him to mess with and alter that aspect, but the turtle worked as a good spell anchor regardless, if a bit weighty.

Making sure that he's touching nowhere near the carved symbol, Wilhelm repeats the incantation a few times so that it will stick in his head. As Lucifer goes on to explain more about the turtle's properties, he nods along to show that he's listening. Carefully, he slips the crystal figure into his pocket.

"I promise not to lose it this time." Referring to the knife Lucifer once pressed into his grip, before Wilhelm was abducted by the masked cultists anyway. Taking up his fork again to stab at the last few bites of food on his plate, he considers Lucifer across the table. "So a whole year, huh?"

They'd basically met right here. Maybe not these exact seats, but across the table from one another as they are now. Wilhelm has always felt that for every step forward he takes, he stumbles back two more. Change, though, isn't an inexorable forward march; it happens in fits and starts and missteps.

A year ago, he thought the man across from him was an odd loner with a chip on his shoulder the size of the whole world. Now, Lucifer has become a reliable protector and pillar of support. A year ago, he went to bed every night hoping he'd wake up back home. Now, he's found things here he could never have possessed there. An open path. Friends who, without the distraction of his title, might actually see him for him. Magic, the power of which he finally sees as his own to take.

"If you lose it I'll just make another one, it just won't be as shiny." Unless he steals Istredd's turtle. But he can't blame Wilhelm for losing the switchblade. At least he's got a new blade now, tucked under illusions to hide it from sight. The Summoned have some permission towards weaponry now.

Lucifer's standing in the castle however is...... a bit rocky, to say the least.

"Somehow, a year." It's been more eventful than he'd prefer, making it hard to really find much stable footing, if any at all. The only stability Lucifer's found is the people around him, but he knows others have gone away, like ghosts passing on. He has no control over it. Over holding himself here or any of the others.

He has been meaning to ask though... "I assume you'd want to go home at some point?" He's barely an adult. Or is now, by his country's time? Whatever. Something of the sort. He maybe has a life, regardless how he feels about his title. It'd be sensible for Wilhelm to want to be away from this chaotic place.

For a yes or no question, it's not so simple. He tilts his head as if balancing invisible scales in his mind. Chewing his food doesn't give him enough time to arrive at a good answer, so, swallowing, he starts to think out loud.

"I don't know. I know I'd be safer there, and things would be a lot more predictable."

The sharpest turn his life could ever take was already behind him, with Erik's death propeling him inexorably toward the throne. Almost too predictable — even now, his chest tightens when he thinks about the life he was meant to inherit against his will. The narrow path he was meant to keep to. With a sigh, his eyes fall away from Lucifer.

"There wasn't anything I really liked about my life, though."

A quiet, hard admission. There's an ache hiding in the shadow of his words, a little ember of anger just waiting to ignite, but mostly it's just matter-of-fact.

"Nothing but the whim of this place dictates you have to go back," he says. "While we don't appear to have any control staying here," a sore subject, "if I have my way, I will."

Istredd, too.

All these thoughts of building a life when Lucifer's only existed surface level in sputtered jolts and most of that time he'd been planning destruction or dreamed of conquering or power or straight up redesigning the cosmos. The concept of establishing a life and living is just...

Outrageous.

Out of his depth.

He shrugs. Picks at a divet in the table with a fingernail.

Thorne's maybe not a good place to be but if there was some changes maybe it could be.

Wilhelm might not have been kept in a cage quite so literal, but it was a cage nonetheless. The title, the expectations, the responsibilities. The weight of letting everyone down, the gravity of never getting to be yourself. He doesn't know what to do either with all the possibilities this world, despite its walls and its laws, presents.

It's enough for him to have a choice at all. That's freedom, to anyone who's never gotten a say in anything before.

"When I think about how I might never go back, part of me actually feels relieved. But then part of me also feels...I don't know, guilty. Only because of my brother."

Because Erik was the only reason he'd ever wanted to fulfil his role of crown prince. Well, wanted is a strong word. He felt that he had to, or he would be failing his brother — in life his idol, in death as good as his god. Though Wilhelm has finished eating, he keeps fidgeting with his fork, twirling it in his fingers and tapping the empty plate.

"I was always doing what everybody else wanted. I mean, I was always trying to rebel too." He shoots Lucifer a look, and for a second a wry grin cracks his pensive frown. "But it always ended with my mom getting her way, and me doing what she wanted anyway. I don't...I don't want to go back to that. I got fucked over."

Trying to appease his mother, but compromising himself and losing the only good thing he had going for him, Simon.

"Guilt is a poor way to live your life." He's said as much to Kell, go figure. "So you stay. You've survived this long." They could keep on, probably. He doesn't trust a lot but he does trust that the Thorne Summoned know how to rally if they have to, and the lot of them are paranoid bastards constantly looking for contingency plans.

Something goes wrong and they might not be ready, but they're not going to be caught flatfooted either.

He leans back, stretched out. "I told you once anonymity has its perks. Very few people know me. Doubt anyone knows you. You're just Wilhelm, and mom's not here. But vacation's over." It's likely been over for awhile, if Wilhelm ever took the time as is to just... mess around. "Time for you to do things for yourself. Real, concrete things. You've already begun to come into your magic, that's a good start."

You work towards being better, Wanda had said to him. That's all you can do.

He carries those words with him when he practices his magic, when he walks through Nott. Burning skylines still smudge his dreams, and those deaths hang heavy in his soul, but he gets out of bed every day. He keeps going.

So he stays. Wilhelm sits with that thought for a moment: choosing this world, despite everything. What was waiting for him back home? He has only two people he can actually trust, and one of them won't even talk to him. A closet, the metaphorical kind of course, that he would have to shove himself back into. A throne, someday, that he never wanted in the first place. He has no power, no choice, no say.

"I still don't even really know what I want. I only know what I don't want," he finally admits. So doing things for himself is...a little hard to navigate.

"Hypocritical of me to tell you anything," he says, "like I have any idea what the hell I'm doing, because I don't. I went from planning an Apocalypse for... most of my existence, and that failed."

Yes he is basically explaining how his villainous plans for evil failed.

So what. Wilhelm knows who he is.

"And then everything since went to pot. I couldn't control anything, I couldn't win, just when I thought I had some fragment of--hope, peace, with my Father--it was gone just as quick. A lie. What really mattered after that?"

He sighs.

"I don't believe in second chances," he says. He's sure somewhere Istredd is sneezing and doesn't know why. "They always seem... out of reach. An illusion, a lie. It makes me sometimes just want to burn this entire continent to the ground, just to break down the game before it bites back at me. Why shouldn't I, really? Just the same as anywhere, the same human problems, just with more magic involved."

He casts his eyes around him like the whole of Thorne is listening in, waiting for one sign to bag and tag him. He's just spouting nonsense, you guys, nothing to see.

"But," he continues, shrugging awkwardly. "I don't know. Second chances are a fairy tale but... that doesn't make opportunities less possible. Not completely out of reach.

"This is a long-winded explanation that none of us likely have our shit together in Thorne and we're just acting like it, going through the appearance of motions. I doubt a single one of us knows what we want. Except many of us don't have a home to go back to." Actually he doesn't know how much of that is true in Thorne alone. But he has some guesses. "So that's the only thing any of us can truly say we want. A place to live, even if we don't know what the hell living is supposed to look like."

He used to wonder, back when his mending trust balanced on a knife's edge, when Lucifer was telling the truth and when he was fabricating a lie designed to twist his emotions. Now, he can tell by the manic slant of his words that these are his real feelings spilling out.

Maybe it should bother him that he's breaking bread — well, figuratively speaking, as neither of them are eating at the moment — with someone who's just admitted to trying to instigate the Apocalypse, but... Wilhelm understands rage. The kind that glows so bright and hot that you just want to use it to burn something else down. Especially the things that have kept you bound for so long.

And sometimes, it smacks him that this is the honest-to-god devil sitting across from him. He forgets, because the villain condemned as the enemy of mankind or whatever feels so far removed from the person he knows. Like a game of telephone, where what comes out on the other end is complete nonsense only vaguely recognizable as what it began as. He's looking at Lucifer now instead of the table between them.

"I like it better when you're honest."

This comes with a crooked curl of his lips. He means it, of course, but he's also stalling before wading into everything Lucifer has said. His shoulders slump with a sigh.

"I guess we have some time to figure it out. More than we would've had, anyway."

What shape they want their lives to take. What purpose they want to carry. Not a second chance, because there's no such thing as a clean break from the past, but it's a different chance to make what they could never have made in their original worlds.

Edited 2023-07-07 04:09 (UTC)

"Honesty can be just as brutal, if not worse, than lies," Lucifer points out. It's why he used to primarily deal in honesty. So much more hurt could be felt through the truth.

The pain from the truth was nearly impossible to shake.

But he does get where Wilhelm is coming from. Lucifer's spoken words to the kid were all true, but boy were there so many holes, things left unspoken, and the fulcrum of his actual identity missing that made it all one big manipulative story.

"More time might be a hindrance," he says. "Get listless, without direction, without a deadline."

Wilhelm knows that, of course. It hadn't been Lucifer's lies that sent him crumbling into an emotional breakdown. The truth hurts, but it heals too, and Lucifer's actions tell him that other kind of truth.

He realizes Lucifer is right about the drawback to having so much time lying wide open in front of you like a boundless plain. It's easy to get lost. For all that Wilhelm has talked about this world being a new opportunity, a new beginning, he still hasn't made much of it. He wants to try.

"So...doing things for yourself," he repeats. He has finally abandoned his fork.

There's a difference, he thinks, between doing whatever you want and doing something for yourself. When he loses hours to wallowing in his head, it's not like it's for anyone else, but it's definitely not for himself either. The deliberateness of it matters — like when he trains with Kyle or practices his magic, and he feels control in a way that has eluded him for most of his life. He tilts a look at Lucifer.

"What about you? What do you do for yourself?"

He folds his arms. For this, he actually has answers. It's built up differently over time but in some outlandish way, for all of Lucifer's chaos, he has some of a routine. Some options. Some work.

"Train people in combat." A few guards, a few Summoned. "Take enchantment classes." Some of it is mind-numbing boring. Something to just keep his mind busy on a task, keep him from crawling up the walls. His face scrunches up a moment and he sighs as though his next words pain him greatly, "Garden a bit."

Not spoken is how many people he bothers on a regular basis. The familiar faces he had obsessively keeping an eye on after the rescue--both for the pit Summoned and those that had to tough it out together--and how just checking on with them every now and then had felt normal.

His lips quirk into a grin at the inclusion of gardening on the list. So it has grown on Lucifer.

Unknowingly, his thoughts wander in the same direction as what Lucifer has left unspoken. While strengthening his body and his control over magic has provided, if not a sense of purpose, then at least some moorings to prevent him from drifting aimlessly, the people he's grown attached to provide a sense of belonging that he never expected to find here. That's a kind of tether too. It's not that he never feels lonely, or overwhelmed by everything this world dumps on him, but there are people who make sure he doesn't drown.

"I think...choosing who you spend your time with, too." Under the table, he kicks affectionately at Lucifer's boot. "I know it sounds weird, but there are less, like, barriers in the way here."

Not the physical kind, though the Horizon makes that true too. He means the invisible kind, like your status or your reputation.

This dumb kid shouldn't have gotten beyond all of Lucifer's defenses and yet in Lucifer trying to use and manipulate him and then failing and... everything that followed...

Well.

Here they are.

Wilhelm breached Lucifer's defenses before even Istredd did, and that is the most crowning achievement possible.

"There is an... advantage here that I never had expected," he admits. They are trapped, yes, but Wilhelm isn't wrong that their immaterial barriers are lessened. And then, an aggrieved, put-upon sigh, "And the people in this faction," specifically Thorne, thanks, "don't completely suck."

There is the bare underlining of genuine fondness to those words.

Lucifer has. Become very... attached to many of the Thorne Summoned. Not just Istredd, and Wilhelm, and Kell, though they are the prime factors.

That's one crown he'll happily take. Maybe Lucifer didn't get the spy he was trying to mold, but somewhere in all that raw messiness the truth split open, Wilhelm found a better reason to give his loyalty to him. While Lucifer sighs, Wilhelm smiles.

"I'm touched."

It's shaped like a joke, with a hand exaggeratedly clasped to his heart, but he means it too. He hears the fondness pushing at Lucifer's words like uncertain shoots unfurling from the earth. He knows that he has a hard time allowing his emotions, especially the kind with soft underbellies, to just breathe.

"Yeah, yeah, don't let it go to your head," Lucifer says, as though Wilhelm hasn't had an abundance of allowances. That Wilhelm could commit any crime and Lucifer would just think 'hm, How to Cover.'

But, he supposes, they've already done that. Lucifer's certain the truth of what happened with Wilhelm's tarot card and their first time in Nocwich will never come out. There's too many safety precautions, including (still) throwing Lucifer under the (metaphorical, ~~thanks, Future Bay~~) bus.

"Try not to get kidnapped again, alright, my sanity can't handle all this."

All the Teenage Drama, as though that was the source of Josselyn's Schemes.

This crooked smile says that he's letting it go to his head at least a little. Surely that's preferable to the sharp uncertainty Wilhelm used to hold in front of him like a weapon, back during the dark months when so much space lay between them.

"I'm not planning on it."

Though, he thinks about it more than he cares to admit. It follows him with the persistence of a nightmare, the fear that somehow he'll get snatched up again, taken somewhere dark and obscure. The enchanted trinket in his pocket is a small reassurance he'll hold on tight to. He pats it again, pushes his hand through his hair.

"Hey, let me know if you ever want some help in the garden again."

Well, it persists in Lucifer's thoughts, too. That he's going to wake up and they're all going to be gone again, at once. Shouldn't be a problem, shouldn't have ever been a problem, but it is, and it haunts him.

He chuckles at the mention of gardening, because he has..... actually kept up with it. At this point it's both a joke and something to fill his day with, because he can't really just shut his mind off and list away through decades like he did in the Cage. He has minutes and hours and days and months and now over a year to fill.

"I could always use a hand."

He gets up then, gets an actual plate of food, but retakes his seat and settles into the odd familiarity that they've cultivated.

I don't trust, but I see right in front of me

Wilhelm / Thorne / June

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