thirty-four ➢ voice + spam

[patheticvillain]

Czeslaw's gone. His door and everything is blank.

. . . I don't really think he made many friends while he was here, but. I'm going to light a candle for him, if anybody wants to join me.

spam } chapel

[It's quiet and still in here, which is good; it matches how Cassel is feeling. Quiet and still, like a windless world. He doesn't know what to make of this reaction. He can feel himself grieving, but it's muted, as though muffled by layers and layers of cloth.]

[With aching fingers he carves Czeslaw's name into a white candle, uses his lighter to light it. After a moment of watching the flame, he carves another name - Slevin's - into another candle, and Daneca's into a third, and hopes (doesn't pray) that they wake.]

Comments

spam }

[patheticvillain]

[He worries his lip, shakes his head. Secrets. He is a little tired of secrets, especially secrets that he doesn't think Daneca should have to keep. But he keeps them for her anyway, though they exhaust him. She's kept enough for him over the years, for worse reasons.]

She needs to learn she doesn't need to be fixed.

[One of those things Cassel had to learn in his own way, too. He learned to, if not love his work, at least see it as something that is part of him, not something that casts him out.]

[Daneca hasn't yet. He wants her to, so desperately - it's important to him in a way he realizes he has no right to. But for someone so whole, she seems to feel so fragmented by something that's intrinsically part of her.]

[If she wants her work taken away, so be it. But Cassel wishes she would have the time to see that she doesn't have to.]

spam }

[lastrat]

If she did, she'd be an inmate.

[It's not that he's inherantly bad at offering comfort. He's still terribly unused to it, even after all the time spent here. Bond prefers the people who will laugh off coddling with dry remarks, the sort who push on and do their job, and to hell with everything else.

That's not remotely what he's done here either, though, and he knows it.]

That girl is one of the few I've seen here with her head on straight.

[He doesn't ask. He knows a secret when he hears one. He does wonder what the hell is going on in her head.]

spam }

[patheticvillain]

[Cassel just smiles. Yeah, she seems like that, doesn't she. He knows better, but he didn't learn through any kind of honest means; it's not his secret to share. It just makes him wonder if maybe everyone is less together than they act like they are. Maybe he's not so unusual for all that.]

[He looks forward again, and drums on the pew.]

She's smarter than both of us put together, that's for sure.

spam }

[lastrat]

I wouldn't go that far.

[But Daneca in twenty years? Absolutely. He smiles a little, eyeing the candles and suppressing the vaguest urge to light one for Vesper. He's not mourning her, not anymore, and he certainly doesn't need to pray for her. She's home safe.

He stamps down the flare of absurd jealousy that accompanies that thought.

Reaching up to clap Cassel's shoulder again, James exhales, and turns as if to go.]