[ What Wanda describes: it's both comforting in the sense of not being alone to see things and also decidedly not, because it brings him no solace to find she doesn't share seeing people who shouldn't be in Abraxas or that she's suffering in a completely different way, let alone suffering at all. At her description Claude's tempted to glance down at himself, to see if that crash upon the rocks is adding to the illusion somehow but he doesn't look away, brow instead furrowed as she explains. He's about to offer what's admittedly a platitude even to his own ears, but before he can there's a bone-chilling cry from outside.
His own instinct is to go still to track the noises as they approach and circle their shelter before he looks to Wanda again to meet her gaze to telegraph the same don't talk, don't move message to her, only to find they're already on the same page. At the knock on the door he looks to it immediately. For all that Claude controls his expressions, shock's apparent after - whatever it is tells them it knows they're inside because he knows that voice. It's Nader, but with none of the cheer his combat instructor usually had when saying something along those lines to coax him out from wherever he was hiding as a child in one of their many games Nader had humored him with. Now it's a reprimand like he's done wrong and he swallows hard.
The voice changes as the door rattles to a woman's voice, something sterner and every bit as authoritative, one he'd heard frequently when some prank or another had gone wrong during their days at the academy and she'd been there to lecture him each and every time with unending seriousness:
C'mon, Claude. This isn't funny. It's freezing out here so won't you let me inside?
Ingrid. There's more knocks and if he wasn't sitting as taut as a bowstring under Wanda's grasp before, he is now. Claude's gaze swings back to her with a quick shake of the head, but what's he confirming? That he knows who that is? That they shouldn't let whoever it is in? Or that he has no idea what's going on? Hard to communicate that and everything else in one gesture when he's holding fast to staying quiet.
The knocks on the door continue varying in intensity to polite to insistent and now there's more noises on the walls. Something sounds distinctly like fingernails running across the cabin's exterior, like it's searching for the smallest opening to pry open. More voices, more pleading, whispers and shouts, all of them looping over and around each other like some horrible out of sync chorus. ]
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His own instinct is to go still to track the noises as they approach and circle their shelter before he looks to Wanda again to meet her gaze to telegraph the same don't talk, don't move message to her, only to find they're already on the same page. At the knock on the door he looks to it immediately. For all that Claude controls his expressions, shock's apparent after - whatever it is tells them it knows they're inside because he knows that voice. It's Nader, but with none of the cheer his combat instructor usually had when saying something along those lines to coax him out from wherever he was hiding as a child in one of their many games Nader had humored him with. Now it's a reprimand like he's done wrong and he swallows hard.
The voice changes as the door rattles to a woman's voice, something sterner and every bit as authoritative, one he'd heard frequently when some prank or another had gone wrong during their days at the academy and she'd been there to lecture him each and every time with unending seriousness:
C'mon, Claude. This isn't funny. It's freezing out here so won't you let me inside?
Ingrid. There's more knocks and if he wasn't sitting as taut as a bowstring under Wanda's grasp before, he is now. Claude's gaze swings back to her with a quick shake of the head, but what's he confirming? That he knows who that is? That they shouldn't let whoever it is in? Or that he has no idea what's going on? Hard to communicate that and everything else in one gesture when he's holding fast to staying quiet.
The knocks on the door continue varying in intensity to polite to insistent and now there's more noises on the walls. Something sounds distinctly like fingernails running across the cabin's exterior, like it's searching for the smallest opening to pry open. More voices, more pleading, whispers and shouts, all of them looping over and around each other like some horrible out of sync chorus. ]