ph_logs | [Closed post] maybe you could make it out with just a little bit of grace

[Closed post] maybe you could make it out with just a little bit of grace

Who: Cassandra de Rolo (

not_the_last), Max Maximum (

maximumcake), Erik Osborne (

lordoftheozarks)
What: An overdue conversation
When: Early November, shortly after the return from the Black Stag
Where: At the Velvet, Ambrosia & Silk
Warning(s): Likely discussion of imprisonment, enslavement, SA, and probably other forms of violence

It takes some time, after Cassandra's encounter with Ophelia at the Visitors' Center, to set up this conversation. First confirming in various directions that all three of them would meet together, then choosing a place, then rescheduling after the upheaval at the Leeds gala, then rescheduling again after the unexpected removal to the Black Stag casino. (They all agreed that holding this meeting there wasn't to anyone's preference.)

But for all that, here they are now, in the sitting room Erik has booked at the town's other brothel -- neutral ground, he said, and Cassandra agreed it was the best choice.

"Thank you both again," she begins, "for agreeing to this meeting."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Erik is the first to arrive after Cassandra. He is punctual to the second. Max follows a minute later, apologizing for the hold-up. They each take a seat on a separate chair, Erik with his legs crossed casually and Max sitting with a straight back and his hands fidgeting in his lap.

"I'm just glad we could finally get it organized successfully," Erik answers cooly. It's all pretense, a cover for how anxious he really feels knowing the general context of this meeting.

"Yeah," Max chimes in with a nervous laugh, "I thought we might never make it."

Erik ignores Max's interjection and cuts right to the chase, looking at Cassandra expectantly. "You said you spoke with Ophelia? What did she say that has you so concerned?"

Cassandra's gone over the possible ways of presenting this, and has settled on blunt.

"She told me that she has plans to bring you to heel," she says to Erik, and turns to Max, reaching to take his hand. "Using you."

Erik's expression turns stormy, and his hands grip the armrests of his chair so tight the fabric complains.

Max gasps, and squeezes Cassandra's hand tight. He's the first to speak this time, while Erik broods in his perch looking distant and angry. "Using me? How?"

She squeezes Max's hand back, just as tight, and keeps her voice steady and clear.

"Her plan, as she told it to me, was to infiltrate Erik's home during a New Year's Eve party, take you prisoner, and hold a threat over your head to force Erik into compliance. She did not specify whether she planned to do this personally or through proxies. I don't know if she will remember telling me this, now that she's been returned home."

Erik has now, apparently, had enough of his own brooding silence. "Ophelia was allied with my sister. She is one of the people I am sworn to protect Max from."

He stands, and paces the room once, then twice, before he continues, "Whether she remembers or not, it won't make a difference. If she is confident enough to talk about it then she doesn't fear failure."

He turns to face Max and Cassandra, "What is even worse is that I received a note from my right-hand man, Josiah, some time ago where he warned me that Ophelia was up to something. He has spotted her on several security cameras around my territory. In the caves. Perhaps she is planning to use one as her hiding place for Max."

"But she can't get me here, can she?" Max asks, still clinging to Cassandra's hand. "I'll be safe as long as I stay here. Valdis and Ylva won't let her get close."

"If she does come here again," says Cassandra, "I suspect more than half the people here will do everything in their power to keep her from getting to you. Including killing her repeatedly, if that's what it would take." A dry nod at Erik; no need to reiterate out loud how well he should know how effective that could be.

"I'm more concerned about what's likely to happen if you both return home. As I understand it, you don't intend to, but it may not be entirely a matter of intent."

Erik bites his own lip to keep back any commentary on how intimately he knows that to be true. But Max isn't so easily fooled.

"I know that's what they did to you, Erik," he says seriously. "You don't have to dance around it in front of me."

"I'm not trying to dance around it, Max," Erik answers softly. "It simply isn't a good memory for me."

"Oh. Sorry..." Max shrink back in his seat.

Erik offers up a reassuring smile, before turning back to Cassandra and the matter at hand, back to business, "That is my greatest concern, as well. I'm not sure what can be done about it. I do not want to return to that life or that arrangement with Max, but we may not be given a choice. Unless one of the goddesses here is willing to intercede on our behalf."

Cassandra presses Max's hand again as he shrinks back from Erik's response, and at the same time presses down the anger she feels about it. That isn't what she's here for.

"If you aren't made to return, then what we have to look out for here should she return is very different. Ophelia doesn't have the same kind of power base here that she has at home, and while neither do you, you have a much greater pool of alliances to draw on."

A long breath. "But if you are made to return, and assuming it's with full memory of this place ... do you have any idea what you can do to guard against her? If she doesn't fear failure, is it only that she's relying on your overconfidence, or does she have some other advantage she didn't reveal?"

It's strange, in a way, for Erik to hear Cassandra assess the situation as she does. When he first arrived, this was exactly why he put so much effort into gathering allies and friends, to cement his power base should anyone like Ophelia show up to challenge him. Now that it's happened, something bitter twists in his belly at the thought of reducing people like River, Chris, Max, and even Cassandra to pawns on a board instead of people he would be distraught to see hurt on his account. He's lived centuries and yet it took until now for him to see this...

"She has good reason to be confident; she has powerful allies and endless resources. The balance of power in vampire culture is fragile. There are many vampires like her who believe they should be above humans and masters to them all. Only the Accord signed in Mother's blood keeps them from doing more than pontificating about it. If someone were to offer them a revolution, they might take it. I've had my suspicions for some time that such a revolution might be coming, and Ophelia is surely involved. Now she means to blackmail me in my own teritory? She has her pride, but she still wouldn't do something as forward as that without an underlying reason. As I'm sure you can tell, she isn't the type for such elaborate schemes. Someone else has put her up to it. I need to find out who is pulling her strings."

Max has remained silent through all of this, but certain things make him twitch and fidget. His fingers close hard around Cassandra's hand when Erik says the word 'master.' They want to enslave everyone? They want to use him as blackamile to do it? Something solidifies in his resolve. No. He'd rather die for real than let himself be used like that.

She feels that tightening of Max's fingers, and again presses back in support. It will not happen.

"Is there any way you can find that out from here? And pass that information back to someone who can use it?"

"One of the goddesses, perhaps, could pass that information back home to Josiah. But I do not know if they have the means to uncover that secret for me." Erik pauses, his brow furrowed in displeasure. "One of the Demons might. They seem to know too much."

"The demons?" Max cries out, clutching at Cassandra even as he turns his wide eyes to Erik. "No, it's not worth it."

"Max," Erik says, chagrined. "I already made a deal with Aster for less. I will do whatever is necessary to protect you and our home."

Cassandra's brows rise. "You've made a deal with Aster?"

(She's inclined to agree with Max, and yet ... if someone has to make that kind of a deal, she knows who she'd prefer to see in debt for it, of the three of them here.)

"No," Max says, "You didn't? Erik?"

"I did," Erik answers to them both. "In exchange for the ability to taste food, I traded my pleasure from drinking blood but not the necessity of it. I gained more than I lost and it was a small trade. Call me an old fool if you both must, but I am not sorry for the choice."

Cassandra purses her lips, and glances to Max. This honestly isn't something she feels like she can comment on, but she doesn't want to rush him past it.

Max fidgets in place, chewing his bottom lip as he looks to Cassandra first, then Erik. "I... I think making deals with the demons is a really bad idea but... I think I get it. I know you always wished you could try the things I made."

"Yes," Erik admits, "But it's so much more than that. Food brings you mortals together across so many boundaries. It exists as an element of almost every party, every milestone celebration, even religious gatherings. I was tired of being left on the outside." It has taken too much of his courage to admit this in the presence of Cassandra, so his gaze stays glued to the floor. All the better to conceal the ludicrous accumulation of moisture in his eyes as Max's voice, full of pity, reaches his ears.

"Oh... Erik, I didn't know..."

"Now you do," Erik answers stiffly. "But we should stay on topic. The point is, I will carry whatever burden may be necessary if we decide we need demonic information."

It is not, of course, news to her that a vampire could be capable of this kind of emotion.

(A kinder person, she thinks distantly, would probably have to steel her heart against being moved by it.)

"Agreed," she says briskly. "Though I would stress if. It may be worth asking the goddesses first. Or perhaps that sea captain, the skeletal one who keeps bringing back foodstuffs from other worlds."

"Yes. Of course you are right." He has already been chastised for taking the demon route when he should have been asking the Goddesses. River might flay him alive if he doesn't at least talk to one of them first this time.

"I can talk to the captain," Max pipes up. "I do a lot of trade with him to get ingredients. But we'll need to get more things from Paradesium."

"We can do that."

A pause. To Erik: "You're on good terms with Dahlia Leeds, are you not?"

"I am. She is my friend." His brow lifts in a curious but not outright suspicious gesture. "Why?"

"You might ask if she has any additional suggestions. About ways to get information from other worlds, or about others who might know."

"I shall ask her, but keep this in mind: though her true father has involved her in all of this, he has not been much more communicative with his own blood than he has been with any of us. He wields her as a tool, very much against her will."

"I feel so sorry for her," Max sighs. "I really don't think she's a bad person..."

"She isn't," Erik insists. "If she can help us, I'm certain she will."

"Being her father's tool against her will can't be pleasant for her," says Cassandra, evenly. "But from what I've observed of her, I don't think that will prevent her from using it in turn, if she can. Especially to help her friends."

Or am I wrong? says the glance she gives Erik.

"Of course," Erik says in answer to her unasked question. "It would be a wasted opportunity not to. She's no fool."

Max remains quiet, but he's looking between the two as if trying to intercept whatever messages are being sent in the air around him.

Cassandra sees Max's look, and turns a little more toward him to deliberately include him in her reply. "I haven't had very much success, myself, in trying to approach her. I'm not sure why. But the important thing is if she'll help you."

"Lady de Rolo," says Erik, "I mean this with as little offense as possible, but you are not always the most approachable woman."

Max's expression darkens and he looks to Cassandra, as if waiting to see how offended he should be on her behalf.

"She will help me," Erik continues. "So, yes, I will speak with her about it. Is there anything else you learned from my Ex that might be of concern?"

Cassandra doesn't look offended; the most negative reaction she gives is a small, faintly resigned sigh.

At Erik's question, she starts to shake her head, then pauses.

"She said a few things about her past, and yours. I don't know how significant they might be. Or how true they were." Another pause. "If you want to hear them, I'll tell you."

Cassandra's reaction informs Max's; he also sighs, but his resignation is about letting it go unchallenged. The next question, though, begs for him to speak up.

"Erik, if it's stuff you don't want me to hear, I can go?"

Now it's Erik's turn to give a resigned sigh. His expression softens with shades of regret. "No, Max. You have more right than most to hear them. Please, Lady de Rolo, I'd like to know."

She nods. (There's a degree of respect in it; it's what she would have chosen in his place.)

"Very well. She told me that she arranged your 'position overseas' without your knowledge. That she was an old colleague of your Sire, and that he had found you ... unruly, I believe was her word. And that she intervened to spare you from his frustration."

He hates admitting to himself that the sign of respect from her is... encouraging. Even if he is working very hard not to show it in his expression, dread fills him as he imagines what Ophelia might have said, what Max might be about to learn.

He was right to dread it.

"She...what?" He goes deathly still, not even blinking. She arranged it all from the start? Of course she did. Of course she did. Why wouldn't she have? How else could he have convinced that decrepit council of Elders to let him declare his own territory so young? They had all seemed far too willing to let him. He was so blind before. He didn't see it. He didn't want to see it. But he's known all along, hasn't he?

Erik startles at the sudden sensation of warmth. Max has moved beside him to take his hand and hold it. Erik's fingers reflexively close, and he looks at Max with unshielded confusion. Max is... comforting him?

"It's okay, Erik," Max says, with those big brown eyes so soft and full of love. "She can't get you here."

It's absurd. Max can say that to him when the entire point of this meeting is that she is threatening to capture him, potentially torture or kill him? And his first concern right now is... for a master who never deserved it. Erik closes his eyes and draws in a deep breath.

"Unruly was the word He used. My former master... my sire. because I refused to be as barbaric as he desired. He liked to... never mind that. He was evil and cruel; that is enough. Ophelia promised to take me away from him. She instructed me to lure him into an ambush. I did, and it succeeded. Once he was slain, I moved to Paris with her and my sister. That was still when I thought she had freed me out of love."

Cassandra, very privately, agrees with Erik that he doesn't deserve Max's concern in this moment. But it will do none of them any good to say so.

"I see. She didn't mention that her intervention involved your former master's death." Faintly dry. "Only that if it hadn't been for her, if you had continued being so headstrong, he intended to put out your eyes."

"He threatened to do it so many times, part of me started to wonder if he really meant it," Erik growls. Now he knows. Knowing doesn't feel any better.

"The world is a much better place with that bastard gone, I promise you. Like Ophelia, he saw no value in human life outside of being his food source. I don't mourn him."

Max's finger close a little tighter around Erik's hand, his voice is soft with sympathy as he says, "You never told me your sire was so horrible to you."

"I don't speak of him often at all," Erik says, stiffly. "And, before you ask, I won't give him the honor of speaking his name."

Erik visibly straightens his back and looks to Cassandra, "Was there more?"

"That's all I can recall."

A pause. Her gaze dwells on Erik.

"You say he wanted you to be more barbaric?" (There is no particular emphasis on the word more.) "Why?"

Erik was all but ready to say his goodbyes, already reaching to pat Max on the hand, but that question freezes him in place.

"Because he was of the opinion that humans were inferior and he enjoyed their suffering. He wished for his heir apparent to feel the same."

She's quiet for a moment.

"I have," carefully, evenly, "some small idea what that may have been like. Though I would venture, at a guess, that it went on considerably longer than I might be able to grasp."

Erik shuts his eyes and wets his lips with his tongue while he tries to make sure his voice won't crack with his next answer. "Centuries," he answers tonelessly. "It went on for centuries."

With his head still bowed, he hazards a glance at Max, only to find the tragic look of sympathy on the man's face soul-crushing. He can't even bring himself to check Cassandra's visage.

"But that is in the past now. He is dead and it is done. I will not let Ophelia use my past to control me, and I will not let her anywhere near Max."

There are things she could say, if she wanted to offer sympathy or comfort to Erik. She considers a few of them, and puts them aside; they may be wanted later. Not now.

"No," she agrees, in a tone of cool approval, "I don't believe you will."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Closed post] maybe you could make it out with just a little bit of grace

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject