All this will not be // Caius

[Altair]

Summer 1974
Around 6.30 am

It was early morning, but he couldn't sleep. So he had risen with the light. Covered himself in that long, black cape and made his way to Hogsmeade to deliberate, to see if he could make contact with the ghost that he had released into that old Castle in which he had previously spent so much time.

It was a plan had backfired on him. Vincent had turned out not to care. Or he was too scared. Part of the problem was, surely, that Vincent Vega was both family and spirit. And Altair had walked too rocky a path. He had imposed that viscous presence onto them. Had made himself a threat more than a friend.

Fourty years later there was not much he could do to change that.

He leaned forward now, propping his elbows onto the stony edge of a grave memorial, to gaze up at the shrack. He should not, of course, for there was something about respecting the dead and buried. Then again, when had Death ever cared to respect him, in that prolonged time that it had spent trying to drag him under?

Altair knew the depth of those pits like the back of his hand. It would take those blackened forces a lot more to try figure out how to beat him at his own game.

There was a flutter then, caught in the side of his field of vision, gentle, wings pale, translucent in the morning light. As he turned, dark eyebrows rose in surprise as the insect made its way past his face, and he grasped for the meaning of the sudden appearance of his mother's patronus.

Except, it was not.

He turned again, toward the rising sun to find the moth was not acting on its own, pushing the hood back off his head to extend his range of vision - there were hundreds, thousands of the little fluttering creatures wobbling against the pale blue of the morning sky, a sight that would truly have been one to behold for someone less used to seeing the unreal.

But where did they come from?

A presence to his left - a boy, by the looks of it, hardly more than seventeen - drew his attention and he straightened, moved accross the grass in the direction of the figure.

"Are these yours?" he asked, gently, not meaning to rip the other out of a potential trance, yet recognision that this might not be completely deliberate.


OOC: This is a meeting of two Seers caught in the same vision.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

He'd woken from thirst. Dizzy with sleep, Caius had sat up, pushed the blankets back. No sooner than his feet had hit the floor of his bedroom did the vision take, a veil of drowsiness heavy around the crown of his head. He tried to fight through it, standing despite himself amidst white fluttering wings. He stood, grabbed at the robe near his bed.

But it took anyway. Head rolling back, stumbling one clumsy step against his nightstand. His mouth was so dry.

The night around him had slipped indelicately, the way that it did, into the oil-slick darkness of the other place. Mirror-finished but still black as pitch, rippling out beneath his feet.

It was a brief glimpse this time, a flash. No blood, no reaching hands, no echoing silence. The second step forward he took into this place landed him elsewhere, the darkness spinning out into a misty meadowscape, dotted with headstones, a village up around somewhere near.

Naturally, he assumed he'd fallen into a dream. A fairly ordinary occurrence anymore. 

The robe he'd snatched from beside his bed hung loosely from his unflexed hand. Caius stood still in the patch of grass, barefoot, wildflowers growing up along the fenceline behind the headstones near him. He stared upward at the sky, which was either light or dark, blue or black, illuminated by a singular source rising up over the horizon, painting the landscape with terrible contrast.

The moths streamed up around him, fluttering skyward in a river. He could feel a breeze, something soft brushing up against his cheek. Chilled breath from morning's own mouth.

The voice drifted with it.

"Are these yours?"

Caius turned, white eyes snapping onto the source. A man in black, watching the moths trail away, his curiosity as mild as the weather.

The sort of face one would see on a statue. Imposing, smooth, knowing.

"No." Caius said, but paused, reconsidered. "Or-- yes, maybe."

Ownership seemed the incorrect way to think of them. They didn't listen to him. They led him. He followed because that was what he needed to do.

The man's presence did not offer any sort of surprise, or emotion otherwise. The dream progressed as it would, as always, and if the dream wanted to offer him a man in black, then so be it. Caius turned back to watch the moths as well, movements wooden, gaze lacking.

His mouth was so dry.

"I don't suppose you have any water?"

Caius' words were directed upward, outward, into the inscrutable sky. Whether water from a dreamed man would help corporeal thirst, he wasn't sure.