5 Winter 518
In the middling light, Caspian grasps clumsily after the bundled shadow he correctly assumes are his last night’s clothing discarded. As could have been easily predicted, he succeeds only in knocking them aside, and with a drawling sigh, arches over the edge of the bed to lazily snatch them back up.
The figure beside Caspian in bed grumbles softly, arms tightening possessively around his waist and drawing him back in.
“Where d’you think you’re going?”
It’s not hard, on this kind of incandescent morning, the sort that blooms and steeps, for Caspian to be persuaded into rolling back into the depths of it. It takes him a solid moment, admittedly - admittedly inwardly only, grogginess only makes him so much of a fool - to recall his enthusiastic assailant’s name.
Thandell? No- Thancerell-
Thusly redubbed Thancerell growls into the crook of Caspian’s neck, making him chuckle in appreciation of being appreciated. Taking liberties Caspian still, at this point, doesn’t so much oppose, this Thancerell - right? Not Thaddiel? - nips at the skin there and digs his fingers playfully into his sides.
They tussle over one another, sheets wrapping ivy-like over limbs and throats, Caspian barking out in laughter until most-likely Thancerell smothers him down.
“I think I like you,” Thancerell says once he’s got Caspian squarely pinned.
“Lucky for you, lack of conviction ranks quite top of my list,” Caspian replies, allowing his chin to be tilted up for a touch or two more of appreciation.
“Any chance I can use that conviction to keep you through next dusk?”
The devices employed involve a series of strokes from Thancerell that send shudders thorough enough to stay him as he’s bidden.
Consequently to all, it’s the following morning when Caspian ambles westward and up the dimly lit stairways to his own home. For the majority of his time in Ravok, majority overwhelming, all time exceeding the duration of the most recently past fall, Caspian has lived alone. And for this reason, for the successively reinforced habit of it, he is entirely stunned to find himself, once past his threshold, suddenly face to face with his sister Taalviel.
Half-sister, he paves over to himself privately, though at this point neither he nor Taalviel benefit from the artificed separation.
“Where have you been?” she asks immediately.
She’s planted herself squarely in the doorway, so squarely as to clearly explain - what, that she’s been strictly listening for his coming? - so obstructively that he’d forced, with exasperated sigh, to sidestep and duck his way past and into his own home.
“Well?” she asks again, swiveling on pinpricks after him.
Not a bird of prey, he reminds himself of her, so if not some bird of prey then she’s no excuse for being the way that she is, save for being certainly insufferably herself.
“One day we’ll get to the bottom of what’s your business and what’s mine and the critically unseldom moments those criteria overlap. Today, I think, is not likely to be that day,” he replies. At his own bedside now, not so unwelcome a sight, he peels off his tailed burgundy coat and ivory blousoned shirt, caring little for her peering after in disapproval.
Why she seems to care so intensely after his comings and goings, he’s yet to wholesomely decipher.
“Were you off with that flame-haired braggart again?” No longer within spitting range now, though still well within darts’ eyes, she’s chosen to recline now at his modestly kept dining table. There’s a tangle of crimson baubles at which she pries - for entertainment’s purposes, likely, because he’s known her to pry more effectively and decisively, and if she wanted to pry for the sake of having completed the doing of such, it would have in moments past been done.
If only his interpersonal interactions with her went with any shared semblance. The agony stems largely from their being inevitably drawn out.
“Well?”
Relentless, she is.
And so ravens prove to be when treated with a carcass.
“I believe he prefers the term ‘blaggard,’” he snips back.
There are softer linens in the chest of drawers beside his bed. As much as he adores his burgundy silks and bridles it’s a comfort to slip out of them now, to tuck himself into sleeping sleeves that crease softly and predictably, and fold himself into a bed that creaks and bows in practiced welcome.
“You’ve just got home, and you’re heading straight to bed?” Taalviel questions in disbelief.
“Recall, sister, a time not so long past, in which I strongly implied that there is a definitive extent to what may be categorized as your business, the excesses of that to be safely regarded as beyond your jurisdiction, and then, perhaps, as mine.”
Fearful of very little, she’s chosen to perch at the foot of his bed now, upon the frame, and though he’s decided to shut his eyes he’s no doubt the expression on her face is one of disapproval.
“Are you hungover?”
“Take your wildest guess,” he replies.
“Are you high?”
“Never so high as you’ve the luxury of sometimes being.”
“It’s a waste of time, all this. That’s my only concern.”
Parrying is fun, sometimes, one of Caspian’s reliable amusements, and especially with Taalviel. But she’s been essentially right on both counts, that he’s dragged himself home in yet again a not so optimal state, though to his credit - not that she’s ever cared to grant him that - it’s not so bad a state as he’s historically taken on. So it’s a little annoying, this, growing more annoying by the second, this being harangued in his own home, a home he’s let her come and go from without demanding she provide report on her decisions and whereabouts. Hardly fair at all. To illustrate his annoyance he draws the covers up over his head and faces the wall.
“You gain nothing dallying around with this one,” she continues.
“I gain attention and a little space away from here,” he retorts, though the severity’s undercut through the muffle of his sheets. “I’d say it’s well worth any dallying.”
“He hasn’t very much money.”
“How would you know how much money he has?”
No reply from her to this, though the question had been a fairly pointless one. Surveillance even for surveillance’s sake is a pastime as much as parrying can be - and the surveillance of one’s sibling’s casual romantic partners often taken practically as an art form.
His own silence isn’t an invitation, though she seems to take it as such, lying atop the sheets in the space between him and the wall.
She’s facing him, fearlessly, peerlessly, and his sheets are thin enough and the midday light sufficiently gleaming that her nearness confronts him in full immediacy.
Due, perhaps, to a lapse in judgment despite all previous reinforcement, a lull in his high, the unerring truth that he’s never quite fully loathed his sister and when she’s this insistent it’s likely for good reason, though that reason may exclusively be of her own evaluation - but Caspian casts off his sheets and frowns at his sister in the light.
“I just think your time could be better spent otherwise,” she says.
“Otherwise,” he repeats.
“Towards making a living,” she utters with decisive punctuation.
This makes him scoff, which makes her sigh, which makes him rub his eyes tiredly and stare up at the ceiling instead.
“Are you telling me to get a job?”
“I’m telling you that maybe you ought to look into laying the groundwork for one, at the very least.”
“I’m laying groundwork.”
“You’re certainly doing the laying.”
It’s an easy gibe, easy enough bait for him to ignore.
“Caspian.”
He’s already turned the other way, pillow dragged over his eyes. A bit sick to the stomach, after all he and Thancerell had smoked and imbibed. Nothing that a little sleep won’t fix.
”Caspian.”
“Tomorrow,” he replies. “Tomorrow.”
Satisfied or not, for the rest of the afternoon she leaves him be.
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WC: 1,336
