Welcome to Gaia! ::

Viatrix's chirp at the door sent Richard upstairs from his position sitting--not relaxing--on the sofa.

This was so far from Richard's first rodeo that he had long lost track of that first rodeo.

Well, that wasn't quite true.

The first time Ignacio had met his eyes and Richard had seen the expanse looking back at him was something he had never forgotten. It had been a punch in the chest then, somehow, despite barely knowing Ignacio, and the memory of it was still a punch in the chest now.

But this was the first time in a long, long time that he had seen Ignacio shut down this far. Waffle House had helped for a bit, had worked as a distraction in combination with the medication and Richard and Livie's presence. It had given Richard enough time to text his parents for advice and to ask his mother to help arrange Richard some openness in his work plans. It had given him enough time to postpone and rearrange Ignacio's public appearances for the next few days. A nonserious, but seriously inconvenient stomach flu, he'd said.

People tended not to want more details after that.

Speaking of food, he'd texted Garber to help with some vegan dishes for the next few days. He had the strong feeling that meat was going to be off the table until Ignacio was feeling better, and it would be a bit yet until his appetite actually returned.

Something about the meat reminding Ignacio of being a youma--

Richard should have known this would happen. Much as he might hope, he had known there was a chance that their purification of Faustite would fall through, one way or the other. A part of him hoped that, given the course of events, perhaps Faustite had just... burned out entirely. A part of him yearned for a chance to try again. But there was nothing, right then, that worrying about it would do for any of them.

He could affect something by helping make sure Ignacio's landing from this spiral was as soft as possible, though. With a purely internal sense of wry amusement, he reflected that at least Ignacio hadn't swung on him. That had happened a couple times, back in the beginning. Back when the only time he saw Ignacio was as a grungy, skinny teenager that he crossed paths with sometimes when out on nightly runs.

"Hey, Ig?" As he cracked the bedroom door open a bit further, "cielo?" His voice was pitched quiet, gentle. "Sadie's here." He slipped into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. "I'm going to come closer, okay?" As he shifted to sit beside his husband, Richard turned his attention back to the door, to the knock on the frame.

To Sadie, he offered a warm smile as he nodded and gestured for her to enter. "Hey. Get the door behind you?"

Sadie slipped through the crack in the door, and drew it shut behind her, bare feet nearly silent on the floor. Her shoes had been kicked off downstairs. She felt at home enough here to do things like that, now.

When she'd sown up on the doorstep of this house a few years ago with her eye out, the scars on her face still pink and angry, Ignacio hadn't flinched. He hadn't stared. She didn't flinch or stare now to see the way he sat in bed barely moving, the way that he wouldn't look at her, the way that even still she could spot the hint of beard growth on his face.

"Hi," she said again, just a little louder, announcing her presence, but she kept her steps soft, her movements slow, not wanting to trigger anything more than what had already been done. "I brought some flowers." Shoving them in Ignacio's face seemed rude, so she handed them over to Richard instead. It was baby's breath, and peachy-pink roses, and curled ferns for greenery.

They were for Richard as much as Ignacio, anyway. He'd never been anything but kind to her, and she smiled at him now.

"And, um, tea. I can make you some in a little while, if you want."

Although now that she was here, with Ignacio talking about Faustite, she wasn't just going to ignore that to scurry down to the kitchen. The news hit her in the chest, although it was half-expected, half-accepted. They'd talked about this on Pendour a few weeks ago. She'd had her cry. Still, to hear it confirmed for certain that everything had failed?

It was hard. It was hard.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked, and then, as she hovered near the bed added, "Is it okay if I sit next to you?"

He'd never minded her presence before, but right now it felt better to ask first, to not push anything.

Pretty things? His gaze shifted from Sadie to the flowers his husband was presenting him with, and he very gingerly reached out to take them. He was willing to make some assumptions. These probably came from her world, considering how lovely the gardens at her wonder were now. His features softened just a tad as he let himself look over them for a moment, softening beyond the exhausted neutral he sat in.

He could use something to drink. Tea sounded good.

Did it sound good? Did he want to be reminded of liquid in his pores, liquid in his lungs, liquid in his heart, liquid drowning him--

Stop.

"I agree with Arra," Ignacio murmured, and that was that as he wrung his hands with a harshness not quite necessary but perhaps needed to keep his head out of the clouds. "Thank you."

To say that was for her presence, the flowers, or the tea, it was hard to say. Perhaps it was for all of it. As Richard scooted over, Ignacio did the same. Plenty enough room on the bed for Sadie. Honestly, probably would be enough room for Luz or Viatrix if they wanted to barge in. He was fine with them not barging in, especially not Viatrix, who he loved but always had her own commentary and he'd rather just get the story out in peace.

... Ha, peace. Something Chaos would never let them have.

More content to turn teenagers into monsters, weren't they?

"I can, yeah," Ignacio let Sadie settle herself before he continued talking. "Faustite had me bring him to the expected spot for his purification. Lended him energy. He invited Nectaris, too." He fidgeted. "We invited a few others to stay hidden in the trees in case suspicions turned out to be true." He wanted to thank each of them individually. "And they did. Overly emotional husbands jumped the gun on their own planned ambush and started attacking the court before they could even purify Faustite."

Instead he burned, and charred, and morphed, and, "The court did the best they could, and we did too -- trying to protect him from the chaos, trying to take the heat off the court, lending more energy, but it only did so much good. Chaos was...," his laugh was bitter, "chaotic. I tried helping Faustite to the court as the youma threatened to take him, but it wasn't enough. He said it was happening. He let go of my hand and distanced himself from me. He disappeared."

Did his body succumb before the worst of the pain settled in, or did he feel himself turn...

... To dust?

He cleared his throat. "... And that was that. Chaos scattered, possibly to follow him. We remained. Some of us went to Waffle House."

He had ordered the pancakes.

While most of his attention was on Ignacio, Richard did watch Sadie as she made her way into the bed and settled there. He made sure she had enough room, even as she folded up her legs and made herself small, and watched discreetly as she gently reached to touch Ignacio. It had been a very long time since Richard had had to duck a reflexive swing, but the possibility was probably always there when this happened, and he was ready to intervene should Ignacio's misplaced self-preservation instinct go Sadie's way.

But when Ignacio didn't jump or freeze, much less react in a way that said he saw Sadie as a threat, Richard settled. It was a sign of how much healing Ignacio had done, but the therapist had always been very clear with Richard that healing trauma was never really quite over in a lot of cases.

"Don't think it was, no." There were some exceptions, Richard was sure, but he wasn't going to bring them up. They all knew those exceptions existed, and bringing them up would be largely unhelpful at the moment. Some people thought Faustite had deserved what happened to him. Richard couldn't say he altogether disagreed. He had wanted to help, genuinely, but Richard wasn't an idiot. Gullible, but not an idiot. Faustite turning on them had always been a possibility.

Granted, in the end, it had seemed different than a betrayal. Less malice, more... surrender.

But did it matter?

Faustite as they knew him, whatever that meant, was gone. Succumbed. Dead?

Maybe.

As good as.

"Waffle House was a good idea, honestly. Kudos to Anakeion for coming up with that." His chuckle was light, airy, deliberately without timbre. Deliberately casual. "Nothing like artery-clogging four a.m. sad breakfast food. But I thought it was good, at least." He loved bacon and eggs. Loved cheap, shitty hashbrowns and pancakes. It hadn't missed his notice, though, that Ignacio had eschewed his own normal choices. No meats, for one. None at all.

Richard knew what that meant.

He said nothing about it.

"Good to get together with other people who were there, too."

"I'm glad that you two liked the Waffle House," said Sadie, because what else was she going to talk about when the air felt as heavy on her skin as it did in here, when she wasn't sure what serious topics might make things worse instead of better. "Although I can't, um, say that your descriptions are making me want to try it. Artery clogging?"

Her brow scrunched.

It wasn't like she was a stranger to that kind of food. The takeout pizzas and stir fries tended to pile up when her mental health took a turn, and she could barely leave her bed. She wouldn't go so far as to say that she liked them.

They were convenient, not good.

Waffle House somehow sounded worse.

Although it felt like she was walking on eggshells, at the same time, it felt wrong to ignore the elephant in the room. She kept her own breaths steady, a metronome that Ignacio could rely on while she rubbed her thumb gently along Ignacio's knuckles, along his fingertips. She saw the way that he kept looking at his hands, and so she did everything she could to ground that part of his body.

"Have you seen something like this happen before?" she asked, as gently as you could ask something like that.

She saw the way that he kept looking out into the distance, or at himself. Sadie had never asked about his trauma before, not really, and she wouldn't press even now, but she wondered what it was that he was seeing.

Have you seen something like this before?

It was an essential crux of a question that pulled his mind far away from the concept of greasy depression food and pancakes and the way the mirror against the wall reflected a face he both recognized and didn't as he looked in its direction. It dug deep inside, cut against his starseed, cut against his heart, cut against his lungs -- it was the right question as much as it could have been at a time like this, and he went almost steely calm as he dug around for the right words and the right approach from that moment.

It had been an odd day when he finally told Richard what was truly haunting him. There had been hints all along and all throughout, but the Negaverse had been even less known then than they were now. Ignacio Araya was one of the survivors of Barren Pines, but that was an organ ring, wasn't it? What did Ignacio mean that it was a monster farm? He was certain it sounded ridiculous enough to be fake and a delusion of a deeply traumatized mind, but tapping into that mental space for a recall had made Ignacio surprisingly stony and lucid as if he had stepped into another state.

It had made it feel truer than almost anything else Ignacio could have said about that place.

Ignacio wasn't sure if that kind of lucidity was necessary, but perhaps there were signs of it in how still he had gotten, and how little he seemed to be responding to the conversation around him. His brain was too busy winding through the little reaction points he remembered from when he finally confessed what exactly it was to his family, in part to make it easier for Richard to do what he had said--almost insisted, to be honest--he would do. Safira had gone strangely still and then asked how deep this web went. Luke had been horrified. Garber tried his best to avoid asking too many questions. Alan looked ready to beat some heads in. Tammer mentioned that bartenders had a way of spreading gossip innocuously if Ignacio wanted more of the truth to come out.

Constantine had asked a lot of questions, so far as Ignacio was willing to answer, and he got the sense that perhaps it had been the start of what geared Constantine up for his particular career path.

His father showing up had been the linchpin in that, but nevertheless.

He wasn't sure how Sadie would react. Perhaps it was best to move forward.

Ignacio came out of his head all at once, followed by a gasp as if he had forgotten to breathe. He glanced to Richard and shook his head gently.

"It's okay," murmured he, even as it wasn't.

What he said next was, at least. "You've been a lifelong resident here, right?" Ignacio's gaze shifted from Richard to Sadie as he bit the inside of his lip.
bit it harder, harder, harder-- "Or long enough, I suppose. Fourteen years ago? There was a school called Barren Pines. It's just that burnt and protected place on a hill now. But it was ultimately reported and excused as an organ ring when a few students that had been missing managed to stumble out, the rest mysteriously missing or presumed fully harvested."

Ignacio leaned back slightly, slapping on the phone he had on the stand and bringing it closer to him. The article he looked up was something of muscle memory to him at this point, but his browser autocompleted it, anyway.

He held out his phone to Sadie to give her context for what had been reported that day, an arguably ancient article from 2009--and obviously ancient by the fact that most news sites had their archival articles in very basic web formats--and let her look through it.

Ignacio let that sit for a moment as he glanced back down at his hands. They weren't green. Not green, not green, not green-- "It was a Negaverse experiment. Abducted a bunch of kids and tortured them to death. Turned them into youma and sent them at each other." It was with a sigh he added, "Tortured me to death and sent me at them."