{You took my life and wrecked it

[shadowthief]

Who: Inej or Klaus + Various
When: Month of September
Where: Cadens / Solvunn + Nocwich / the Horizon
What: Various threads through the month.
Warnings: Inej: stealing; murder; descriptions of touch aversion, anxiety, depression, PTSD; heavy trust issues, paranoia; mentions of past instances of prostitution, slavery, and sexual assault. Everything will be clearly marked if-when it comes up.
Klaus: flippant references to child abuse/neglect/violence, mentioned and played out use of drugs/alcohol/other facets of addiction, mentions of death/the dead/ghosts, descriptions of depression/anxiety/panic attacks/suicidal ideation/PTSD; will clearly mark if-when it comes up.

but I've been resurrected

Yeah, baby, I'm the Comeback Kid

Comments

{Your lips, my lips, apocalypse » Nadine » Horizon

[bestfuneralever]

Though he doesn't get to see her in person very often, Klaus has come to very much enjoy his astral plane sexcapades with Nadine. She's something of a goddess in the moment and he brings fun kinks to the table to try, if she's into the idea of the day. It's the best kind of trade-off, if you ask him.

Burying his face in the crook of her neck, he curls an arm around Nadine's waist to tug her closer, riding the wave of the afterglow in that overly-tactile way he has about him. Even without sex on the table, Klaus has a habit of being a little too fond of physical touch for the likes of some people; luckily, she's never seemed to have much in way of complaints about it. He gets to indulge as much as he likes.

He nips playfully at her shoulder with a soft growl, "I think I need a cigarette after that," he hums softly, a pleased sound if there ever was one.

[nadine_he_loves]

"God, I haven't had a cigarette in years."

Nadine stares upward at the ceiling of her gazebo, just relaxing in the aftermath. She's taken to turning the floor of the garden structure into a bed, both to enjoy the surroundings of nature and simply because she prefers to keep that bit of distance that not trysting in her Horizon home brings.

Besides, sex outside is fun. And no risk, here. There are definitely some advantages to astral plane hookups. Though Nadine has known that since she was in her twenties.

She rolls into Klaus, casually throwing one arm over his chest. It's nice that he's not ever in any rush afterwards. When she describes him as 'fun', she doesn't just mean in bed. Aside from the occasional disturbing personal detail here and there, he's fun to talk to and be around. Maybe she is just into artsy, bohemian men. Between Jaskier and Klaus...if nothing else she's obviously attracted to free spirits - all three of her partners fall under that category.

"I have something better than a cigarette, anyway." It only takes a thought and there's a very substantial joint between her fingers.

[bestfuneralever]

“That could never be me,” he says with a laugh, “I have to keep something,” for the stretch of months in Solvunn Klaus has been clean from the harder drugs he’d been a fan of before but thus far has refused to give up cigarettes, weed or alcohol. The disruption of his life from dad’s funeral, Number 5’s return, Number 7’s near-Apocalypse, and the things he’s witnessed here so far have shoved him backwards from any true promise of sobriety he may have been on the course of.

He relishes in the softer side of things, perhaps because they’re so few and far between for him.

“Ahhh, I do like the way you think, babydoll,” he grins when she blinks the joint into existence— there are some serious advantages to the Horizon, honestly.

[nadine_he_loves]

"I have wine and pot, so..." Nadine shrugs. Though the latter more than the former. "But when the US got really anti-smoking, the school I worked for put a lot of pressure on teachers to quit. Considering we were an elementary school, I get it."

They were supposed to set a good example and it was a small town. Couldn't be doing anything that could corrupt the youth.

Look at her now.

"Cannabis is better anyway. It tastes a lot better than tobacco. I think I only smoked because I...wouldn't do anything else. No drugs, no alcohol...I had to do something."

She lights the joint with another thought and takes a long drag. It's only been here, in Abraxas, that she's allowed herself to indulge and to let her mental state be altered. Back home, it was too much of a risk.

[bestfuneralever]

“I guess that makes sense, don’t tempt the impressionable youth,” he says with a higher tilted tone than his usual in a singsong voice at the end, fingers of his right ‘hello’ hand in a twirl above them. He laughs once at that and drops his hand back down again.

He plucks the joint from her fingers once she offers it his way, “Mmm, can’t blame you. We all have… our… vices,” he mumbles around the joint now tucked between his lips. He takes a long, deep inhale and lets a shudder run down his spine. Melodramatic as ever.

[nadine_he_loves]

"Oh, I had a whole morality clause." Which was standard for that sort of place. "Don't miss that."

There's honestly plenty that Nadine doesn't miss from that life. This one is, by almost any comparison, much better.

"But you're right, I think everybody needs some kind of vice. Even if it's just...chocolate or cola. Actually...do you want an RC? I could really go for an RC cola right now." That's one of the things she does miss, but can easily replicate here. Cadens has carbonated drinks, sort of, but it's not the same. And Klaus looks like a guy who appreciates an underdog soda.

She tosses him a little grin.

"Need to rehydrate."

[bestfuneralever]

"That's...weird as shit," he says through a laugh, but then he realizes maybe it isn't? His life isn't the most typical after all, and he adds, "is that normal in a job?" He has... never really worked a typical day job a single day in his life, actually.

He hums a soft agreement and grins, "Holy shit, I haven't had an RC in years!" Which is pretty much the same as an enthusiastic yes as she might get.

[nadine_he_loves]

"It's normal for teachers at private schools, yeah. Parents pay big bucks to send their kids there, they have 'expectations'. So we couldn't do anything that could be considered 'immoral, deceptive, scandalous or obscene' or 'tarnish, damage or otherwise negatively affect the school's reputation'. Which is very vague, but..."

The implications were pretty clear. Live clean or lose your job. Which really hadn't been a problem for Nadine. That was how she'd be living without the job anyway. It had all worked out, in a way.

With a little laugh she summons up a pair of chilled, bottled RCs. Bottled is always best, particularly straight out of a corner store cold case.

"I meant it when I said you wouldn't even recognize me if you met me when I was younger."

[bestfuneralever]

"Nadine," he rolls his head to one side to level her with a look, and though his tone is just this side of severe, the smirk on his face betrays all of it. "did you just recite something from your contract with them from memory?"

He laughs, a delighted sound when the bottles appear. The Horizon is still so novel to him– good thing he didn't have access to a literal world of his own creation when he was in the worst throes of addition, actually.

"I think you'd know me just the same," which is, perhaps, a kind of sad thing to admit. That he hasn't changed that much from when he was young. No real growth in who he is has happened, stunted by the trauma and hindered by addiction and fear.

[nadine_he_loves]

"It's a standard morality clause, that's the wording for all of them. You'd probably be surprised at how common they were. They have a lot of wording about behavior, but in 'our' time, it was mostly an excuse to fire people over dumb social media posts. At least in the US I come from. Pretty unpopular opinion, but the end of the world wasn't all bad. Society was...a mess. And just getting worse."

Nadine knows that God did not send the plague. If anyone did, that would be her MIA husband. Though she suspects he just sort of helped things along. But the fact remains that the world had been a in a bad state and heading towards a worse one. So much of what was wiped out...could probably stand being wiped out.

Of course then half the survivors just wanted to rebuild things back the way they were. What was wrong with people? Flagg was a monster, but at least he'd been trying to do something different. Horribly, horribly different.

"Some people are always who they are, Klaus. And some of us go through life hiding who we are. I hid who I was, for a lot of reasons."

[bestfuneralever]

He snorts a little at her unpopular opinion. "Hmm," he hums thoughtfully, setting his drink aside and shifting onto his side, propping his chin in his head, "agree to disagree, there, darling. I mean- society is terrible, obviously, but I'm not so much a fan of the world ending. Ours was family drama related though, sooo..." he shrugs. There's a lot to unpack in that statement, and he might answer her questions a lot easier than she might think, if she just asks them.

"We have a lot of things in common, you know..." he says thoughtfully. Hiding is... an intensely familiar thing, it's kind of the main theme of his entire life if he's really completely honest with himself. Most days he isn't, of course. But Nadine is a safe space, he thinks, and that makes it easier to talk to her. Really talk, not just the superfluous bullshit he gives most people.

[nadine_he_loves]

"I guess it depends on how the world ends. The planet was fine. Nature was fine. Things kept growing, animals kept making more animals. And suddenly there were a whole lot less humans messing everything up and making toxic waste and shrinking the ozone...."

Nadine shrugs. A meteor or nuclear war or something like that would be different. That would destroy everything. The end of her world was really more the end of the dominance of mankind. It wasn't even the end of humanity - there'd already been two pregnant women in Boulder when she left.

"It's like...forest fires. They destroy a lot of things, yeah, but they also get rid of all the overgrowth and everything getting choked and the forest can grow back even better. Nature does that kind of thing all the time."

Not even humankind was immune to nature.

"And yeah...I kind of had a feeling we did."