{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

[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."