abraxaslogs | Now that you're actually not cool, I kinda like you better. (Open/Closed)

He adds to his small but growing list of things he knows about her that she's some kind of food connoisseur. Wilhelm gets it, trying to recreate something from home to add a dash of the familiar to a foreign world. The castle's kitchens produce vague approximations of dishes he remembers from his old life, but the taste is never quite the same.

"Oh, just looking around for work." He gestures loosely to the bustling street around them, lined with all kinds of shops. "Some of these places will pay you to just do a couple chores. I guess it's cheaper than keeping an extra hand around full time."

That's when he notices the sketchbook tucked under her arm. Without seeing that it's already populated with drawings, he assumes that it's another new purchase. His tips his chin toward it.

"You're an artist?"

"Ah, so that's how other people make money." She knew Mat did things around the town, but she wasn't sure if that was just him or a universal thing. "I actually get to trade in my craft."

She pulls her sketchbook out from under her arm. This is the one she uses for more day to day affairs. Flipping through pages full of sketched flowers and vistas, but also the margins full of small half-conversations she's had with locals. When reading lips wasn't quite working. Or notes to herself about how magic works, or how local berries can serve to replace Earth fruit. It isn't a cell phone, but it'll let her message others easily enough.

Some beautiful sketches from the Feywilds. Nothing from the Masquerade sadly, she didn't bring it along as she was in no mood to try. But the rest of the trip is immortalized. Alicent Hightower talking to a gathering of fey, the lakeshore, market stalls, studies of Vash the Stampede and Kell Maresh's faces, the listening tree...

Lucifer about to be hit by a Greyhound bus.

Perfectly normal sketches.

Wilhelm shuffles closer to get a better look over her shoulder at the sketches she leafs through. There are a few faces and places he recognizes in the charcoal, all good likenesses of their subjects. He taps the drawing of Lucifer to get Bay's attention before he speaks.

"What's this one?"

While she can't hear the curiosity in his tone, she might read the concern in his eyes as he studies the scene she's laid out. Unless he's interpreting the sketch wrong, it looks like a bus is about to smash into an unsuspecting archangel. Logically, this could only have happened in the Horizon — which also means, technically, that Lucifer couldn't have been hurt if it did happen. But why would Bay draw something like that?

She stops as he gets her attention, and has an easy time reading his lips even at this weird angle.

"In the Feywilds, this creep started talking to me where I couldn't see him. I only knew cause he was weirding out the shopkeepers. He was trying to warn me off of trading with the locals. He suggested I might have traded my artistic abilities rather than just the sketch I was bartering with."

"This was me proving I could still draw." There was a general air of frustration and annoyance, merely talking about this guy. "He went on to pretend he couldn't understand sign, but was so bad at being a normal person I could tell. Why, you know him?"

His expression turns awkward. That definitely sounds like—

"Yeah, that's Lucifer."

Well, at least he wasn't actually hit by a bus? Bay was just taking out her frustrations through her art. Still, something swells in Wilhelm, demanding that he jump on the defensive. Love, he supposes, the kind with hackles and teeth. Loyalty, the weight of which he feels as surely as the weight of the crystal turtle he keeps in his pocket, its belly carved up with protective charms, a gift from Lucifer.

"He's...a little rough around the edges, but he's not so bad once you get to know him."

"He acted like my not hearing him when he was talking behind me was my fault." If her tone didn't say she was angry, the expression carries it to the goal line.

Like- above all, everything with that man was unnerving and terrible. She hated to admit he wasn't wrong, when it came to having a healthy distrust of fey deals. But he went about it like he was the only sane man in a world full of children, and generally rubbed Bay the wrong way at every point in their conversation. Meaning that 'not so bad once you get to know him' felt far, far too lenient to her.

"...Wait did you say his name was Lucifer. As in- the devil?"

He actually takes a step back from the anger radiating off of her. What she feels is valid, and he doesn't think there's anything he can say to diffuse it, but that protective thing stays curled up inside him like a fist. Which is why he balks at Bay's question at first: he's not sure how much he's supposed to reveal, or if it's his place to reveal anything at all.

"Yes and no," he settles on. His expression has turned guarded.

"Well, mostly yes. All that stuff about getting kicked out of heaven is true, at least in one version of the world. But that doesn't mean you should believe everything that's in the Bible. What's that saying, about history being written by the winners?"

"Barring the fact that I now believe in Christmas miracles, I'm not really religious." She didn't care what the bible did, or didn't, say about him. She was more or less on the side of organized religion is a good idea abused by people... like her dad, to support hating things he hates. So if he was, or wasn't, the monster waiting for everyone in the afterlife wasn't really her concern.

She does clock the change in Wilhelm, it's not hard. She could take so much of his money if she didn't think poker was a terrible idea. She's not sure how to put the man in front of her and the man she met in the feywilds into a context together, other than there is a context. She thinks it mostly drags Wilhelm down. Still, not worth fighting over.

"Right, so I'm going to stick with my plan of avoiding him. Unless I am so desperate to be understood that I need an interpreter. Which even then I don't trust him to translate without adding commentary."

He's not sure what makes him say it. Lucifer could probably care less that a random teenager thinks he's an asshole, and if he did care he probably doesn't need Wilhelm fighting any misguided battles for him. In fact, this haphazard path is probably going to cause more trouble for the archangel. Nevertheless—

"I could ask him to be less of an ass to you. I don't know if he'll listen, but..." He shrugs, pushing a strand of hair behind his ear. "He might."

Because Wilhelm finds himself in the unique position of having the devil more or less wrapped around his finger — a power that he's only tangentially aware of, having caught it in glimpses the rare moments when, rather than lurking beneath the surface, it rears its head like some great beast.

You know a teenager offering to get the devil to be less of a jerk is sure- not a conversation Bay was expecting to have today. Or ever. It's a little more confusing than it is anything else.

"Why is it so important to you?" She wanted to just say 'please don't' but the more interesting topic at hand was surely that he seemed compelled to offer. Lucifer didn't seem to care who liked him provided Thorne's summoned were more or less intact. Bay was more than fine avoiding the devil, regardless of how much of this was just bad PR.

His eyebrows bunch together, and his shoulders draw into a shrug.

"I don't know."

Aside from the fact that Lucifer is important to him, and there's more to him than his abrasive outer shell, so it seems a shame to overlook the parts that take longer to see. All of that's harder to explain, though.

"I just think...wouldn't it be better to not have to worry about avoiding him, or accidentally running into him? The castle isn't that big."

Wilhelm has played that game too. Of course, his avoidance was tied up in emotions more difficult than annoyance, aches like betrayal and rage. Lucifer had been a wound once — one that healed with time and attention.

It would be nice, if one of the handful of people able to understand her in her first language... could. Even if just to interpret for her. But that would rely on her trusting him not to editorialize her words. Which she wasn't very certain she'd get to, even with Wil's intervention.

"I didn't expect to just never see him again, I just figured I would do my thing. And he would do his. I need time, before any of that will mean anything. And trying to force it won't improve the odds."

As much as it would be nice, for everyone to get along. It took years for her and her sister to actually get along. Longer for her parents. So it just seemed best to let this go, at least for now. "I know you mean well, and I might take you up on this when I'm ready. Okay?"

"Sure," Wilhelm nods.

He wasn't going to force the issue, but the offer hangs there between them, ready whenever she is. As a sort of peace offering and a subject change, he gestures to the sketchbook.

"These are really good, by the way."

Even the one of Lucifer getting pancaked by a bus. He could tell exactly who the figure was supposed to be, in any case.

"Thank you. I have a lot more time to draw, and my focus is a lot better than when I was Hearing." She smiles, a little uneasy in the praise. Not that she hates it, it just feels like an opening to talk more. But talking more about herself is always weird.

"It's weird, I want to draw all the things I see here." A fantasy world with weird around every turn was just- very exciting to try her hand at. "But the things that sell best to the locals are my paintings of Kansas City."

"A life that got stolen from me. Twice."

Only half of her meaning adds up in his head. Obviously, getting Summoned here accounts for one of those times. He supposes that if he thought the life he had back home was worth anything, he would consider it stolen too. But the second time? He wonders what could have happened.

"Oh." The pause is clunky. She doesn't have to be able to hear to discern that. "It's kind of nice being able to remember it through your art, right?"

Please don't ask him to locate Kansas City on a map, though.

Yeah, she notices when people stop, their mind working around a thing that doesn't make sense. She frowns a little. He's not the most open is he.

"I should probably offer it to other people, I can work from photos on the Horizon, then draw them here." Photos on the Horizon could also just be- full recreations. She isn't picky, she'll just need to go back and check every so often. Although it's a bit daunting to dive in and out of the Horizon like that.

"You were confused about what I said." Maybe it'll help him understand her, or help him know he can't understand her. She does want to sit down and finds a spot they can both sit for this one, "Daphne Paloma Vasquez was born on October 23rd. In a Kansas City hospital. Her mom was a hairdresser working out of her house she shared with her boyfriend, Angelo. They wouldn't get to see her for fifteen years though. As another couple had a daughter on October 23rd. A rich couple from the other side of town, professional baseball player and his homemaker wife. The girl they gave birth didn't go home with them either. Their daughter Bay Madeline Kennish."

She's watching Wilhelm, seeing if gets what her story means. It's not that she really wants to talk around using the term, the problem is that it isn't the story that she wants to tell. "And the twisted part is my life got stolen when my sister and I screwed up, were given a Christmas miracle where that mistake never happened. We got the lives we were suppose to be born into. How messed up is that?"

No, he'd grown up learning how to build walls around himself. Even now, he does it subconsciously — and tearing down those walls requires a very conscious effort.

Anyway, it's a weird conversation to have while casually gathered at the edge of a bustling market street, even after they've found a stone ledge to perch on. He listens closely, but the knot of confusion doesn't loosen from his expression. At the same time that Bay answers one question, she leaves him wondering three more.

"That's...pretty fucked up," Wilhelm agrees, because what else is there to say?

"So the hospital sent you home with the wrong parents, and nobody realized until way later?" He tilts his head like he's trying to calculate some complex equation. "What do you mean, a miracle?"

Life doesn't grant do-overs.

"I did become a disaster when I found out. It was weird." Bay ponders on the best explanation. "Everyone had been whispering about me since I was... six or seven. They looked at my mom and dad, at my brother. And me. My pale skin that didn't freckle, my dark hair. How little I looked like them, how different I was. So knowing I wasn't crazy? Fantastic. But I also got to see a whole life I didn't get, and my parents fawn over a girl who was everything I wasn't. And they were so mad she got sick and lost her hearing like that didn't just happen sometimes."

And that was the rub, wasn't it. Bay just described herself hearing, and Daphne as Deaf. That life she coveted, she got to have it. And she couldn't say one version was better or worse, she could just say what this version cost her wasn't worth what she gained. But if she'd never been her, maybe she would have been happy with it.

"We tried to spend Christmas together, it was our first Christmas as a weird blended family. My mom goes nuts over Christmas. Fifteen different cookies and a schedule planned to the minute of family cheer. My birth mother wants to have a relaxed Christmas eve, quick round of presents at noon, and sneak Chinese take-out into a movie." Bay shakes her head, it was such a stupid argument mostly because one mom was stubborn, and the other traditional to the point of stubborn. "So my sister and I kinda thought- we'd be better off if the switch never happened."

"And we got that." Bay gestures at her merely decorative ears. Yes, it didn't make sense. The universe doesn't give do-overs. And miracles don't happen. They were sitting on a stone wall outside an apothecary in a castle town where they lived, in a castle, full of mages. The universe did whatever it wanted.

Give him a moment to wrap his head around everything. The strange things that happen here in Abraxas make some amount of sense in the framework of a world governed by volatile magic, but Bay comes from the same boring, mundane world as him. Maybe the how or why doesn't really matter, though. Elbows resting on his thighs, he tilts a look at her.

"Do you still wish it never happened?"

Or was it better to never know what could have been?

"She's my sister." It's a clean answer to a complicated set of feelings. The switch matters more to who she is than just about anything else, and the only reason she could make sense of her new life without the switch was because of the switch! No version of her life without her parents, her brother, and her sister felt right.

She seems otherwise accepting of all of this, not overly annoyed by how her life is a disaster of tangled chaos. It- just is her life, and she's come to terms with it all, even being here.

"Seeing my other life just put all the flaws on to it. Took away the dream." The dream wasn't real, it would never be. She was glad for that truth. Also the truth of who her parents would be if the switch hadn't interrupted their lives, for good or ill.

Now that you're actually not cool, I kinda like you better. (Open/Closed)

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