15S R4 Week 2 Saturday Night

[joinhands]

[OK, so, if you were following a briskly walking crying lady, you would find yourself in the game room at a dead end. Which is surely for the best. Except, gosh, who moved the iron maiden so the open part is facing the wall. How negligent.

Spoilers Krone is sitting on the ground behind it crying with her arms hugged around her knees.]

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TPN novel spoilers

[joinhands]

There's no substitute for another pair of eyes.

[Krone's are twinkling. Like they often are around Eric.]

I had someone like what you're talking about once. A sort of older sister. Cecil... [Krone closes her eyes.] Franklin.

[She exhales. As if everything is coming back in vivid color.]

Seemed to be prepared for everything. Never complained. Always smiling. Except in the face of evil.

[Krone opens her eyes and lets down her legs, hands in her lap.]

That might have seemed like a tangent, I just mean to say... Alliances like that are truly beautiful. There's no need to be ashamed of it.

[Her lips quirk.]

And frankly, your resemblance to Cecil is downright uncanny. I thought if you didn't know it wouldn't be fair.

[yonosoymaria]

["There's no need to be ashamed of it."

Does Krone know, then? Does she know, and with that smile is she hinting that she is the same?! It isn't the kind of thing one can come right out and ask, Eric knows that as much as he knows that falling means hitting the ground at some point, knows it like he knows he can't breathe underwater.

But he wants to ask. He wants to, but refuses to - this is all still too new, too fragile to take such a risk. Let her think it's a thoroughly exhausted and more than slightly pathetic response to a compliment, if he's trembling. He isn't sure that he is, at least. It may just be the possibility of being seen and not judged has his head ringing.]

It's not often that I feel I'm being genuinely praised, being compared to a woman - God, forgive me, I've said that terribly! It isn't often that I'm compared to a woman who touched someone's life and she wouldn't be insulted by such a comparison. I hope I can live up to her.

[This is not the first time he has felt like a blindly fumbling boy around Krone, but it's the first time he's babbled out his feelings so clumsily as all that. He can't help but blush - it comes with the territory of feeling lost and saying things he meant in words that meant the opposite.]

[joinhands]

[Krone cycles through various degrees of gently amused at his awkwkardness about the entire (what he'd undoubtedly call the) fairer sex but when he comes out with that last desperate vow she's close to cracking up. Christ, he's a pretty mess, rose wine spilled over a renaissance painting. Eric always looks to be worshipping something, like those Catholics in modern France who can't bring themselves to mention it in company anymore. She feels bad dismissing his efforts, really she does, so as she finally bursts out laughing she flaps up both her hands in the air. No, I'm not armed! It's the longest he ever heard her laugh, just plain bending over like she can't breathe.]

It's just that—you can't call her a woman. She was only fourteen.

[Wait, so if Cecil was the older one, that means Krone...?!

Then she stands up as she'd have to do to hang him up on the wall.] You will, though. I'll hold you to it. OK, Eric?

[yonosoymaria]

[He isn't sure what he's done to earn that laughter, but it's also obvious enough that it isn't meant cruelly. Such a sound couldn't be.

And then it's clear. She fell when she was young, too, though she was the younger, and younger than he had been by far... He brushes away thoughts of John at fifteen, already tall and broad-shouldered as Theseus, as Patroclus. Those are memories he doesn't want this place to steal.

Her hands seem to frame him as though she's the sculptor and he the model whose imitated form could scandalize a generation of critics who needed to be. (He has given it thought, of course - he'd portray her as Minerva, in dark bronze that would evoke well the richness of her skin and hair. Minerva, but not sedate, no, a goddess of wisdom and war.) He nods - for a moment there's no other response he can make. She trusts him to be the best that he can.]

Of course. We should both do our best, shouldn't we?