Logs:Fragments

Fragments

"A million legs, armored exoskeletons, mandibles that burned with fire and acid..."

Players

Dunning
20 September, 2022

Solomon provides lasagna, mild threats, comedy, and horrifying insight on Arcadia. Darwin is there for the ride (and food).

It's late in the afternoon, and Darwin remains a heap on the guest bed. It's clear he's been awake a few times, from how the glass of water on the nightstand has moved about, and how the sheets twist, and now his phone is on the floor, haphazard and perpetually unlocked because fuck security in a world of secrets.

Perhaps on /purpose/, Darwin takes up the entirety of the bed as a massive wolf, akin to the shape he took to attack Solomon in the park that one pleasant day. He heavily bends the mattress with the weight of his limbs, and my god, there's gray fur everywhere.

Solomon has mostly left Darwin alone. There's some music that played, low but still barely audible through the door, during the afternoon hours while Solomon has been writing. And then, just recently, there was a knock on the door as food was delivered. The smells of pizza or possibly lasagna - something hot, garlicky, and tomatoish - do seep under and around the door and permeate the air after a while. And about the time they do, there's a knock on the door...although Sol doesn't wait for someone to say come in before he opens it and says, "You probably ought to eat something before you start hankering for manflesh--Jesus Christ you're a wolf." Surprise shades to indignation. "You're a wolf _on my clean guest sheets_. What the fuck!"

Darwin flicks an ear and pretends to ignore Solomon. For... a few seconds anyway. The lure of something hot and garlicky is too much. He lifts his head, licks his nose, then twists to flip onto this back, knocking the sheets to the floor as the mattress creaks. He thrashes a little, like the rude guest he is, shedding even more fur against the sheets. It's obvious, at least, that he's not feeling like frozen shit anymore.

Growly laughter follows Darwin off the mattress, and he doesn't even wait for Solomon to get out of the way as he tries to squeeze through the doorframe in search of pizza-lasagna.

Solomon is noodly, and so Darwin is going to definitely win that squeeze-match. He stumbles back a couple of spaces, leaving plenty of room for even a massive wolf. Although not without an outraged noise at the fur all over the bedsheets, and a muttered, "Should have booked a vet appointment. See how you liked waking up _fixed_." More loudly he adds, "If I wanted fur all over my shit, I'd wouldn't have pets that come with exoskeletons."

Speaking of, the bugs have clearly been fed, because they're as active as bugs ever are, rustling and scurrying in their terrariums. And there is, in fact, deep dish lasagna - a large tray of it - along with a big dressed salad and even a few cannolis for dessert, all laid out on the kitchen counter. The branding is from a local Italian place. Solomon trails Darwin, and reaches out to lightly bat at the wolf's tail. "Have some fucking hands for dinner. If you try and eat like an animal, I am going to feed you dry kibble."

Darwin's maw hangs over the big dish, like he's absolutely contemplating eating like an animal. The bat against his tail prompts a little more thought to manners, and he sits back on his haunches with a warbly, grunty sound of displeasure. When he shifts beside the table, it's not without some discomfort, lips curled in a wince as he slumps into the nearest chair. "Javi basically told me to do it. Basically. It was all Javi's fault," he says, a slow grin splitting his face. This grin fades quick, when he finally spots all of the /skittering/ around him. "God. Fuck." He can't even retreat into his many coats, now stripped down to a sleeveless undershirt. "So many legs..."

"MMmhm. Blaming the guy who checked to make sure you weren't gonna die once that thing let go of you? Classy, Pace." Solomon stares, openly, when Darwin shifts, his head tilting to one side as the blue eyes seem to be studying the phenomenon. Maybe there will be a test on it, later. But once it's done, he snorts and walks past to serve up two plates, Darwin's piled high with food. "I can't even contemplate what your metabolic processes must look like without wincing," he says, by way of explanation. For his part, he's dressed as casually as before, with jeans and a t-shirt. Definitely not professoring outfits. As he returns to serve up his own plate, he says, "What are you drinking? I've got water, soda, beer, and milk. And don't insult my insects; they have exactly the right number of legs."

Darwin probably shouldn't be as suspicious as he looks when Solomon serves him. But glorious food! He even partakes in some of the salad, though it takes a few wary glances from the plates to Solomon to make sure that this food is, in fact, for him, and to be eaten. He waves his hand, sawing into the lasagna with a fork. "Pretty sure I'm the classiest wolf you'll ever meet. And I wouldn't want to imagine my intestines either. Milk, please?" Something about Solomon's leggy comment makes him pause. He regards the terrariums carefully, then says with a measure of sincerely, "Sorry. They're good insects. Like, when I get over the skittery feeling, I can appreciate 'em. That's how it's working for my ant matriarchy."

Solomon fetches milk, pouring Darwin a large glass. For himself, he grabs some soda over ice and settles at the tiny table across from the other man. For a moment he looks uncomfortable. Or perhaps just awkward, before he picks up his fork and starts eating. "It's fine. You're phobic. That's hard to get over. I appreciate that you're giving it a shot." Then there's a sharp-edged grin. "Which is the only reason you didn't wake up with a dozen spiders weaving a web between your ears, for the record." He gives the man a thoughtful look-over. "You're looking better. How are you feeling?"

Darwin ends up tuning Solomon out at first, entirely swept up in just how hungry he is, and just how good the food is. He carefully cuts and chews his food, of course, but at an impressive speed. It hits /all the spots/, and it takes him a few moments to catch up to Solomon's words. He prickles slightly. "I'm not /phobic/. That makes it sound weird! I can get over it. If I just buckle down and like... I dunno', maybe there's some exposure therapy I could try." But the thought alone, of webs between his ears, is enough to make him drop his fork and feel against both sides of his head. He grumbles, gaze narrowing.

"Feel great," Darwin says, pausing just long enough to enjoy a long drink of milk. "Feel better than I have in months." He rolls his head back against the chair to enjoy a moment of pleasant chill. "I'll be tasting those fucking peppers for weeks though."

Solomon snickers. "Trust a fearmonger, Pace. You're absolutely phobic. You can barely think about insects without your skin crawling, can you?" He smiles and shakes his head. "It's not weird, though. Most people are afraid of insects. There's something atavistic about the revulsion." He eats more slowly, but with no less enthusiasm. At the words 'exposure therapy', something wicked lights up in his eyes. "Well, that could be arranged. Let's make sure you don't have any lingering effects, first. Heart attacks are so inconvenient." He watches Darwin as the other man leans his head back. "They were excellent quality, you know. If I cooked, I'd make something tasty with him. But I don't, so watching you stuff your face with them will have to be pleasure enough."

"A fearmonger," Darwin repeats with a particularly dry look that twists frustrated the longer Solomon talks. "It's not-- it's just--" He growls, mostly at himself. "I've seen humans /hollowed out/ by these monstrosities. Like... made into sock puppets. Warped until they're nothing but fucked amalgams of carapace and limbs and hairs and..." He sighs. "Look, for some stupid reason, it's important to me that you know that /that's/ the reason, and not because I just don't like insects because of some human atavism." Upon seeing Solomon's wicked expression, Darwin meets it with a steely look. "Sure. I'll take whatever you can dish."

"Maya thought you cooked," Darwin smirks. "She had all sorts of nice things to say about you. I bet if you spent more than five seconds not actively trying to freak people out you might have more than just wolf fur in your guest bed."

Solomon blinks. "How interesting," he murmurs, in between bites of the lasagna. "That's not how real spiders behave at all. But--" a pause. "I do understand. Not that there's anything wrong with a _human_ atavism," he adds, voice dry, "but I've seen more than my share of insectile horrors, as well. Not even knowing that they're not truly insects helps. Although if you actually want me to cover you in spiders so that you can see if that helps, I'm game." His expression suggests that he doesn't think it would help, but _does_ think that it'd be amusing.

When Maya is mentioned, though, he blinks, clearly caught by surprise. "I...oh. Well. That's kind of her to say," he murmurs, suddenly flustered and uncertain. "She doesn't know me very well." A glance towards the room. "And that room wasn't meant for just any guest, actually." A pause. "Isn't."

Darwin drags a plate of cannoli closer. He goes quiet, chewing a pastry and watching Solomon with a thoughtful look. He /wonders/. But then he starts to think too long about the idea of getting fully immersed in spiders and ends up squeezing the creamy ricotta out of his cannoli.

Darwin's turn to look pleased, if only for the small victory of causing a completely normal fluster. "You're straight, right?" he asks, then follows his gaze to the guest room. "...Aw man, did I just mess up something sentimental in there?"

Solomon looks down at the cannoli, then up at Darwin, then back at the cannoli. He snickers. "You're asking me if I'm straight and then squeezing thick, white cream from a tube? Freud would have a heart attack." He shakes his head, then. "No. Nothing sentimental. It's fine. More of a--hope, than anything." He takes a drink of the soda, then lifts his shoulders into a shrug. "I've mostly slept with women, I suppose. Honestly," there's a little chuckle, "when most of your companions have things like snakes for hair, or are literally made out of water, or smoke, or glass? Whether a random hookup happens to have a penis or a vagina stops...mattering as much. At least for me. Can't answer for anyone else."

Darwin is, like, halfway through licking the cream from his hand when Solomon makes the lewd connection. He fumbles with the damn pastry until it falls back to his plate. "God, Jessup!" he huffs. But he is far from done. He's got a whole nother slice of lasagna to work through, and half a salad. And, just for kicks, probably because he's in too good of a mood, he pushes his empty milk glass forward. Just a bit towards Solomon, seeing if he'll actually refill it. "Yeah, makes sense. Wonder what it's like to fuck smoke."

Darwin stares at the guest room, lips parted like he might ask /more/. But, instead, "...Do you, uh, normally have trouble sleeping? It sounded rough last night. I mean it was either you or one of your bugs."

Solomon laughs out loud when the cannoli tumbles back to the plate. "Oh, was that not intended?" he asks, with incredibly fake innocence. He's settling back when Darwin pushes the empty glass towards him. He looks at the glass and heaves a sigh. "And now you're begging for another serving of my milk. I had no idea, Pace." With a snicker, he rises to his feet and retreats to the fridge.

Although if Darwin was looking for a good way to ruin Sol's gremlin tendencies, he found it. He keeps his face averted and his tone carefully neutral. "I have nightmares. It's nothing important. Most of the time I just try to keep my sleeping to naps, but I suppose I ended up going too deep a few times last night. I apologize for waking you."

It's almost an art, how Solomon can flip everything back on Darwin. His cheeks darken deeply, and he just... rips the cannoli in half with his teeth as Solomon goes to fetch his drink. The feeling of victory, gone!

Though, to his credit, Darwin eases up when Solomon's tone shifts. "...May I ask if this is a Solomon thing, or a lost thing? And it's fine, I slept all goddamn day. Javi fought off my phone calls like a champ."

At least he gets milk out of it? Solomon brings the filled glass back and sets it down, before sliding into the table across from him. He's not smiling any more. "I haven't done an exhaustive accounting. But yes, most of those I've talked to don't sleep well. The content and quality of the nightmares vary but--" he trails off, before reaching out to spear a cannoli with a fork. He seems less interested in eating it than with staring at it as he uses the fork to methodically break it into shards of crisp pastry and cream. "We don't remember most of what happened while we were gone. When we're asleep, we remember more. The Dreaming Roads lie closer to Arcadia than we like to think about. I suppose things...seep."

Darwin might've been watching Solomon's face if Solomon weren't methodically destroying that cannoli. He does, however, thank him for the refill. His features shift, subtly, and it's not quite horror that builds in his eyes, but some flavor of intense anger. Anger with no subject, no target. He licks his teeth, closing his eyes to try and clear his emotional palate. "What's Arcadia? Is that another word for the Hedge? Javi said that you took him, once. He said he wanted to go back."

"No," Solomon says, without looking up. He carefully scoops a bit of cannoli mash onto his fork and picks it up. Still staring at it rather than eating it...or looking at Darwin. "Arcadia is a name for the place beyond the Hedge. The Hedge is a liminal realm. It has roads to many places. One of them is where They live, and that place has many names. Arcadia is one. Tir Na Og, or Underhill, or Niflheim, or Hell, or whatever--a part of me suspects that any place you care to imagine has its dark seed in that realm and its gods."

Darwin can't help it. He has to pull out his ratty notepad and write some of this down. He absolutely doesn't know how to spell Tir Na Og. "And if I'm remembering correctly, it's difficult to tell how much time passes there--?" He's careful, OH SO careful, when he gently leads into his next question, "And you can't remember how you escaped?"

Solomon eyes the notebook. "...am I being interviewed?" He doesn't seem upset, although the topic clearly robs him of a healthy appetite. He puts the fork down, untasted, and rubs at his face. "I don't know if that's how I'd put it. Time passes differently there. Some people can spend a few days there, to find that a hundred years has passed in our world. Or be imprisoned for twenty years, only to stumble out to find that two weeks passed here." His hand freezes at the last question. It curls into claws that lightly rake his own skin. "I remember most of that. It's one of my more clear memories. It might not be for everyone, though."

"No! Well. I mean, I just... this stuff could be useful one day. I don't exist in a vacuum." Darwin studies Solomon for a quiet moment, tapping his pen against his notepad. "Listen. Before I ask more shit and piss you off and get my ass kicked out, I wanna' thank you. For helping me. For letting me stay here, for /feeding/ me. Legit! No fuckery! I mean it! I don't know where I'd be without you and Javi. And... I hope you know you can count on me to help, if anything goes tits up on your end."

"I'm not upset," Solomon says, quietly. "I'm interested, too. In others in the world. If you hit somewhere too sensitive, then I'll tell you to back off. But talking about it--sometimes it's a part of ruling your fear, rather than letting it fucking rule you." He takes a drink of his soda; his cheeks turn red at the thanks and he squirms with visible discomfort. "I'm not a monster. I wasn't going to toss your unconscious ass out in the hallway. And no one's stupid enough to starve a werewolf." A sniff. "But sure. Now you owe me." A flash of his teeth - but there's more awkwardness than malice in the rest of his face.

Darwin seems satisfied, even if Solomon can barely tolerate the gratitude. He doesn't laugh at the partial threat, but he certainly /smiles/. "You get to cover me in fucking spiders, I don't owe you shit," he counters, then sits back in his chair, pushing his empty plates away. Phew.

"Alright, Sol. What do you remember of escaping?" Darwin asks.

Solomon sniffs. "I'm covering you with spiders at your request and for your own benefit. I don't get anything out of it except _amusement_," he says, haughtily. Clearly more comfortable with taunt and countertaunt than with _genuine feelings_ of any sort. But oh those questions. He turns away to look at the nearest terrarium. "Not much of _there_. I remember...I was hunting something. I got away from the Swarm, mindlessly pursuing something or another. And I thought--it might have been the first thought, REAL thought, I've had in a while--that I could just keep running. So I did. I ran until the world changed, until I was ripping and tearing my way through Thorn and bramble, leaving pieces of myself behind. I didn't care, because the more I ran, the more I remembered _me_. A person. Someone who didn't belong. The Thorns tore off my other legs, ripped the chitin away, let me wriggle free, naked and bleeding and mostly human, until I found a gate and tumbled back through it."

Darwin says nothing further on the eventual spider bath and what anyone stands to gain out of it. He listens patiently, quietly scrawling notes here and there, but the paper is soon forgotten as Solomon touches on thoughts and thorns. Darwin looks up, working hard to keep his features neutral. Very hard. His eyes are quite wide now. "So when you're taken, you're just kinda' wiped? You forget how to think? Are these thorn barriers everywhere? Is... is the Swarm what I think it is?"

"Not everyone. I don't think. It's--every Keeper is different. What it wants, what it shapes its captives into. My Keeper...what I remember of it...was very primal. It didn't have to be, I remember more clearly when it lured me into Arcadia, it was a tall, old man with a whispery voice, like thousands of paper wings rasping against one another." It's even odds whether he notices that the hand clasping the soda glass is trembling, just a little. "I think it enjoyed taking people who were...thinkers? And making them _not_. Bringing out the beast in them, the instinctual, savage heart of every creature." He takes a quick, sharp breath. "Anyway. Uh. Um. The Thorns are in the Hedge. And yeah, they're everywhere. I don't know what you think it is. It just _is_."

Darwin has abandoned his notes, shifting in his chair far too carefully, like he's afraid of making the damn thing squeak and disrupt anything. "Sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel." He folds his arms and leans in on the table, rapt. "Alright. So, this whole... thing. This abduction, takes pieces of you. First to make your fetch, and then when you escape. Can you tell what's missing? Is that... tricky?" A pause, and then, "The Swarm is other people? That got lured? All... spiders?"

Solomon snort. "Yeah. More Barker than King, though." What the distinction is, he doesn't say. "And no, not aside from my memories. I know I've left shreds of myself on the Thorns. I've heard you can retrieve them, if you can find them and nothing else has taken them. It's one of the reasons I came back to Chicago." He drains his glass, and shrugs. "Hell, I don't know. I think some of them were. But I don't remember much. And we weren't...human any more. We weren't spiders. Or not completely spiders. We were primal, Pace. A mad god's idea of perfect, insectile hunters and devourers. A million legs, armored exoskeletons, mandibles that burned with fire and acid...whatever you can think of."

"You intend to go pick up pieces of your /soul/-- I cannot begin to imagine what that even looks like, or why anyone would /take/ them--" Each new piece of information spooks Darwin further. He no longer tries to hide his reactions, either pushing his hands through his hair or twisting up a piece of paper from his notepad. "M'kay. Okay," he murmurs, rubbing at his eye with the heel of his palm. "I take it this is what you were referring to, when you said you've eaten the worst kinds of things."

Solomon arches an eyebrow. "Can you not? A soul is a beautiful, rare thing, Darwin. Not to mention the hold you could have over someone if you had their soul. Hobgoblins and the like adore having treasures, and trading treasures. Plus, if the fragments got to a Huntsman, or worse, back to my Keeper..."

He gives a little shudder and moves on, hastily. "You remember that?" He smiles, just a little. "But, yeah. I'm pretty sure I've eaten everything that didn't run away fast enough. And been eaten, in turn."

"So-- Okay, yeah, in that case you'd definitely want to... retrieve the fragments. Shit." Darwin gathers enough of himself to scrawl something. Solomon can see bullet points. Hobgoblin, Huntsman+, Trade. "/Eaten/?" He adds another shaky note: life cycle. "J- ...Sol, I'd like to continue this conversation another time. I think I've hit my horrifying shit limit and the skittering on my peripheral is getting worse."

Solomon snorts at one of the bullet points. "It's not a life cycle, Pace," he mutters, with a touch of defensiveness. "It's not natural. It's just--what some asshole god wanted." He pulls himself up, sharply, then sighs. One hand runs through his hair; it's shaking slightly. "Yeah. Yeah. I think that's enough. Uh, eat whatever you want and chuck the leftovers in the fridge. I'm going for a walk." He stands abruptly and heads towards the door, clearly intending to do that without any more hesitation than is necessary to grab his wallet and keys.

"Alright alright. I don't know! I don't know shit! That's why I ask," Darwin says, pushing up from the table. Since genuine feelings are difficult, Darwin opts for gentle ribbing as Solomon moves for the door. Gratitude would be odd here, after all. "Are you sure you wanna' leave me here unsupervised? There's some cushions on the couch over there that look super chewable."

Solomon hesitates at the door. He doesn't look back at Darwin, but there's maybe a hint of a chuckle under his breath as he snaps back, "Oh, please feel free. I always wanted a wolf-skin rug, and you'd probably heal from that anyway." Then he stalks out the door and closes it with a bit of a _bang_ behind him.