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TEST DRIVE MEME 005
⚰︎ ⍢ ⌲ ⍚ TEST DRIVE MEME:
Welcome to RUBILYKSKOYE — a dark, horror-smut game where player choices will drive a mod-run storyline about the world and its NPCs. This test drive meme provides a medley of prompts evoking the game's general tone.
THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the any event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.
CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: spiders, aphrodisiac and truth serum effects, public nudity, exhibitionism/voyeurism, bdsm, kink negotiation, social pressure, and animal sacrifice.
If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.
FAQ ✧ SETTING ✧ CALENDAR ✧ RESERVES ✧ APPLICATIONS
THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the any event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.
CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: spiders, aphrodisiac and truth serum effects, public nudity, exhibitionism/voyeurism, bdsm, kink negotiation, social pressure, and animal sacrifice.
If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.
IN THE WOODS SOMEWHERE
The chirping of partridges in the treetops rouses you. Light barely filters through the canopy, just enough to suggest daylight. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the light has taken on a sickly green. You lie amongst the frost-covered mosses and ferns, the frozen soil cold and just a little damp on your bare skin. Wherever you were before this moment, whatever you were doing or wearing, when you awaken in this forest, you find yourself naked and helpless as the day you were born. As you sit up and get your bearings, aside from a brief wave of disoriented nausea, you seem to be no worse for wear than you last remember.
You seem to be alone. The gnarled oaks and moss suggest no sign of civilization or sentient life. Just flickers of movement from curious squirrels or brave lizards reemerging after a long winter. With your feet under you, and you'll find the wood is filled with berry bushes and nut trees, though much of the fruit has been picked clean. The freshwater stream that runs north-south, populated by both poisonous toads and delicious crawdads, will lead people towards the first signs of civilisation, the cabins of those who choose to live beyond Rubilyskoye's formidable walls.
In the forest, you may run into others with stories just like yours. Some may have already formed clumsy nudist groups, others may still be processing their confusion, with no memory of how they got here. Now is a good time to overcome any hang-ups you have about modesty; it's going to be a long hike.
Turn your back to the darker, shadowy parts of the forest and eventually the glow of manmade lights and the curve of a dirt road may come into view. At the edge of the wood, you'll find a town surrounded by a fifty-foot wall of beige stone. The only entrance is an iron gate positioned on the southern edge. When you arrive, the gate is already open, welcoming people inside.
This quaint, historic town of five-thousand has cobbled street and signs lit by gas lamp. Wooden shutters protect otherwise open-air windows on the buildings, which are all under three stories with gabled roofs. A number of businesses hug the main street — a clockmaker, a cobbler, a grocer — while residential homes sprawl outwards towards the wall. At the far end of the main street, visible about a mile to the north now that the trees and the enormous wall is out of the way, sits a castle with three towers.
When you enter, the streets are full of people, but despite any efforts on your part to hide or make excuses, they don't seem offended by your nakedness. Even families with children don't gawk or look twice. Those determined to find proper clothing regardless will find that modern clothing stores aren't available — the closest this town has is a tailor's shop and a stand in the central marketplace selling scarves and blankets.
breaking and entering
If you intend to have your character break into someone's house or yard to steal some of their clean laundry, please review the info about game laws on the FAQ and give the mods a heads up HERE.
Fortunately, the people of the town are very generous! Anyone who ask the locals will be directed to the boarding house for both clothes and a place to stay. Accessible through an embellished iron garden gate and obscured by hanging plants, trees, and vines, beyond an overgrown yard in the residential sprawl of the town is a bright-red door, which opens to a spacious cottage of several stories. It's already full of people who appeared in the village just as you did today.
finding roommates
Don't spend too much time asking questions in the common areas. You'll want to claim a bedroom quickly because each one only has two full-size beds, and there aren't enough spaces for everyone. Maybe you'll get lucky and run into someone who has decided to move out? (Roommates will not be mod-assigned; players should coordinate directly with one another to determine their living arrangements; at this point, many characters have used activity rewards to move to accomodation outside the boarding house.)
Get a good night's rest. By the light of day, locals will help get the new arrivals set up on the coal stove with a breakfast of thick grain porridge and caramelised bananas from the new peaks; these NPCs can also answer any questions about the situation. You may notice they're dressed in a way you would almost call normal — at least, in a manner befitting 19th century Eastern Europe. Gossip about new arrivals spreads quickly, and Rubeans who run businesses or train trades are eager to help you find a place to apply your skills so you can contribute to your new home.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try: naked hiking, acquiring clothing, being offered work, asking questions over breakfast, or staking your claim on a bedroom!
HEARTS FESTIVAL
New arrivals to Rubilykskoye will find themselves strongly encouraged to participate in the current zadza purging festival, and will be assigned either a collar in leather or iron based on their Niez or Wilk mark, or a wrist-strap or manacle that suits the attachment of a leash for those with a Diabel or Skala mark.
Characters are encouraged to embrace this temporary designation as a sign that they will be good citizens; those who object or ignore their designation may find the NPCs try to helpfully guide them, express displeasure at "Void-Touched" who won't assimilate, or in rare cases exert social pressure, coercion, violence or shunning to ensure compliance.
Throughout town various NPCs have set up tents and booths to host myriad performances, workshops, demonstrations, and food stands for their celebration. The foods were made using some of the new flora that have brought back from the peaks. Characters can get their hands on the following heart-themed foods from the second day of the festival onwards:
The nature of the booths set up for performances, workshops, and other goods focuses around the festival's dominance and submission themes. These persist throughout the day regardless of the hour or the audience, so very few people can be found consistently at their places of work during the day this week. In addition:
However, characters may also come across some carnival games operated by NPCs who are eager to help the Duchess find her heart! Some involve slaughtering livestock by removing their hearts—rest assured, these livestock were already on the menu, but their ritual sacrifice will now involve the cutting out of their hearts. Cut out an animal's heart yourself, or just attend the show! Many of the townspeople will get into it, painting their faces with animal blood or drinking from it.
Characters are encouraged to embrace this temporary designation as a sign that they will be good citizens; those who object or ignore their designation may find the NPCs try to helpfully guide them, express displeasure at "Void-Touched" who won't assimilate, or in rare cases exert social pressure, coercion, violence or shunning to ensure compliance.
Throughout town various NPCs have set up tents and booths to host myriad performances, workshops, demonstrations, and food stands for their celebration. The foods were made using some of the new flora that have brought back from the peaks. Characters can get their hands on the following heart-themed foods from the second day of the festival onwards:
- HEART-SHAPED COOKIES: eating these intensifies body heat, making characters a great cuddle buddy for the cold weather and likely to strip down, feeling overheated even in a snowdrift
- BEEF HEART STEW WITH DUXELLES: eating these fills those who consume it with confidence, making them more solicitous and dominant
- LIME-GLAZED GOAT HEART SATAY: eating these intensifies sensation, making characters more sensitive to both pain and pleasure
- CINNAMON GLUWEIN: drinking a cup of this hot beverage will make characters especially honest
The nature of the booths set up for performances, workshops, and other goods focuses around the festival's dominance and submission themes. These persist throughout the day regardless of the hour or the audience, so very few people can be found consistently at their places of work during the day this week. In addition:
- Skala and diabel NPCs may offer to share their partner(s) with the Void-touched, or ask to share theirs.
- PIOTR, a farmer, brings tools over from the farm including bridles and saddles, which can be found at a booth near some hunters who've made anal plugs that end with real animal tails, as well as muzzles.
- The cages from the Moot Hall have been moved into the streets, and people are allowed to move freely in and out of them. One of them has been covered in curtains to function as a glory hole booth.
- Some niez and wilk NPCs line up near the main event stage and kneel to offer themselves as human furniture.
However, characters may also come across some carnival games operated by NPCs who are eager to help the Duchess find her heart! Some involve slaughtering livestock by removing their hearts—rest assured, these livestock were already on the menu, but their ritual sacrifice will now involve the cutting out of their hearts. Cut out an animal's heart yourself, or just attend the show! Many of the townspeople will get into it, painting their faces with animal blood or drinking from it.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try reacting to being assigned a dominant or submissive role, scenes where your character is starting to feel the effects of the food, watching (or participating in) a performance, or joining in on a gory animal sacrifice. NPCs that are usually welcoming may strongly pressure even new arrivals to participate in their cultural festivities.
the fathomless dark
At the outer edges of the forest, shadows grow long and the air grows thick. Though the sun never grows warm red-gold with sunset, the wood darkens. Birdsong is replaced by the click of mandibles and the skitter of many legs. Anyone who ventures out this way will soon find it difficult to see before them, even in the middle of the day — eventually, even the brightest magical light source or darkvision cannot stretch further than a few inches. In the void, the air feels heavy, as if it were not air at all but some more solid mass. Almost like liquid-smoke, it presses down upon you. Slowing your movements. Characters who push too far into the void may stop being able to move at all, and find themselves given over to insanity if they collapse, unable to draw themselves out. This is just one of many dangers.
Monsters thrive this far out. Huge, blood-red spiders the size of hunting dogs drop from the treetops. In addition to their venomous bite, which contains a fast-acting paralytic, these creatures are clever: they attempt to use their webbing to entangle any trespassers, binding limbs together or to trees. If you're unfortunate to become fully cocooned, you don't have long before this forest will be the last thing you see.
Those who seem lucky enough not to run afoul of the monsters here are in for a worse fate. The void can play tricks on your senses. As madness sets in and you lose all sense of direction, you may also lose control of your body — what is that steers your hands to turn against your friends? Why does it sound like your own voice whispering?
In the fog, you may also hear the voices of those familiar to you — people you know from the town, or people whom you know with almost perfect certainty aren't here. these figments may recreate unhappy memories or force trespassers to hallucinate their worst nightmares. Nothing is as it seems in the void, and when you swing at these figments, desperate to silence them, it might not be a figment at all, but a friend in the flesh trying to help you. By the time you see their true face, it could be too late to stop yourself.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try fighting a monster, hallucinating your worst nightmares, and/or attacking a friend or stranger!
HIDING INSIDE EACH OF US
Uh oh spaghetti-os.
The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.
Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.
Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.
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Poor Merta Chesnokov, the usually stalwart older woman who mans the Apothecary, has been beset by unusual requests in addition to her regular demands, not to mention sweating blood. The festival, a rash of skala blood flu, and a little extra town chaos in January, has brought a high demand to her little shop. Now there's also a local fashion springing up for teas and herbal remedies sourced from the recently revealed tropical mountains.
After another failed tisane test drive, and the third customer asking for a new kind of aphrodisiac to add to their festival food, she was seen tossing down her work knife with uncharacteristic frustration, and taking an "early lunch" that she didn't return from that night. Though her children, friends and employees reach out to her, there's no sign of her until you stumble upon her in the woods.
Merta overboils with her suppressed fury as her body distorts and her flesh blackens and crusts. Her attempts to hold off her transformation have failed, and Merta turns into a Smoldering Skink, a large repillian creature whose thick scales hold back her magmatic insides. The noise she makes is an unhearthly hissing scream like a boiling kettle, and she attempts to vent her pent-up stress by wildly attacking everything in sight. Immediately, the surroundings catch aflame! There will be a small fire eating at the dead wood of a long winter if it's not put out, but your first priority might have to be fielding a stampeding lizard with massive teeth and burning hot scales...
(There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)
The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.
Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.
Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.
someone else transforms
After another failed tisane test drive, and the third customer asking for a new kind of aphrodisiac to add to their festival food, she was seen tossing down her work knife with uncharacteristic frustration, and taking an "early lunch" that she didn't return from that night. Though her children, friends and employees reach out to her, there's no sign of her until you stumble upon her in the woods.
Merta overboils with her suppressed fury as her body distorts and her flesh blackens and crusts. Her attempts to hold off her transformation have failed, and Merta turns into a Smoldering Skink, a large repillian creature whose thick scales hold back her magmatic insides. The noise she makes is an unhearthly hissing scream like a boiling kettle, and she attempts to vent her pent-up stress by wildly attacking everything in sight. Immediately, the surroundings catch aflame! There will be a small fire eating at the dead wood of a long winter if it's not put out, but your first priority might have to be fielding a stampeding lizard with massive teeth and burning hot scales...
(There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)
you waited too long
At first, as you hide yourself from your darker impulses, a subtle itch develops under your skin. An irritability that makes you snap at the person who bumps into you on the stairs because all those fleeting emotions that you've been repressing bubble to the surface. Every dark thought you've had about being here, all the fears of never getting home, of being surrounded by ticking time bombs, the anxiety of wondering who you might hurt or what relationships you might betray by doing what you have to do. The anger. Oh, the anger.
Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.
As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.
As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
no subject
It's no short, sharp pinch. It's high enough that his fingers find purchase on her skin where the wetness she's smearing onto his dick mingles with traces of water to create something tackier. He uses three fingers instead of two and wrenches her flesh slightly, for a good few seconds before releasing her. If she wants bruises, that will leave one.
He doesn't mind the bite; it feels pretty good. The wanting is good, this . . . assurance that she wants him in fact and not just theory, easy enough to take your clothes off for a guy behind bars who can't actually touch you. Even the pinch itself is confirmation of that, that he can do the things she said she wanted doing and won't recoil from him when push comes to shove.
She can consider it a note.
Anyway, just because Ransom hasn't let himself indulge in play-by-plays, doesn't mean he hasn't made observations or envisioned scenarios. She gets plenty wet to go around, and it's easy to slip his fingers up to her pussy, card them through the folds and drag them back between her ass. A few more times should be enough to get them going, and it's not like she's in short supply. Another thing he knows: Marta's impatient, but he's really not.
no subject
Her tears don't taper off... not that she really expected they would, since some people involved in all this between the two of them happen to know themselves pretty well. Coming to terms with Ransom being real and tangible and within reach is both an event and a process of realization that is bound to occur over and over again. Marta is very happy to see him, to touch him, to be touched in return. She is also well aware he will turn her impatience against her, and that she will gladly allow him to do that.
Marta tries. Both to have more patience and to press the issue in turn, to try and catch his fingers to tempt them inside her at either end. She moves her hands from his neck to frame his face, thumbs tracing the lines of his cheekbones. "How long are you going to torture me with this, Terrible Man?"
no subject
The way Marta cries right now is almost pure in how physiological it is, like a font breaking behind her eyes with a snap or twist of his fingers. And the curve of her body isn't even so deliberate as approval or encouragement, which he's not particularly interested in either. It takes him a moment to place it: surrender. Submission, if you like, but this feels more potent than any submission he's experienced.
It's a heady feeling for someone who's been in his position for the last year and change. For that reason alone (he knows some stuff about himself) Ransom wants to distrust it. He probably will later. But right now it's such a rush that it even overwhelms his stubborn suspicion. He lifts the hand not currently wet from her cunt and strokes a thumb through one of the tears. Not wiping it away — he doesn't want them gone, his intent not to soothe — but trailing it down the already tracked path. It's only when he realizes they're mirroring each other's touches that he drops his hand back down.
"If you think this is torture," he says, sliding a finger inside her cunt, "you're in for a world of pain, ma petite mort."
no subject
It works, in terms of startling her nerves away from chasing the high of his touch to the quickest culmination possible. For how long that will remain true is anyone's guess.
"That's not really an answer to my question." She can't stop her hips from rocking against him, nor is she trying right now. What she is doing, now that her cunt is too occupied by his finger to continue teasing his cock, is wrapping her hand around the base as she lifts her hips a little bit to give herself a bit of room to work with.
no subject
He shrugs slightly, mostly the opposite shoulder, but the carelessness is belied by his expelled breath when she takes him in hand. He wants to lean against something solid (and maybe a little cold), tip his head back and just watch her ride his hand — and whatever she plans to do with his cock — but there's only empty space, so there's just that much less between them that he can't look at all of her at once. Maybe he's done enough watching, but he does like to. He's never had any complaints about that in and of itself.
"And I'm saying," he answers, "it's not really torture if you know when it's going to end. You've waited a lot longer without that answer." Granted, he was never touching her and is aware of the gulf of difference now that he is, but— Ransom's expression goes through it at the observation, if briefly. Confusion, uncertainty, desire, resignation, disappointment, exhaustion. Yet it's blithe in his way when he says, "You really need one?" It's so much easier to draw a hard line between them when it's just words, and just Marta on the page, the person he once imagined her to be; there always seems to be a limit to how much and how well he can prepare himself for Marta in actual fact.
no subject
Canting her hip just so is something Marta does with a lot of conscious thought; she doesn't want to let her hand go, even briefly, and besides she can.
Mind also too actively busy with her own question, but a breath of realization shudders out of her. "No, not for me. You torture yourself. You make me stand by." Another little breathy laugh, chased immediately by a gasp. She has to stop rocking. She has to just take it.
First, she's got to brace herself. "I'm selfish. I want you for myself." Marta's face is still on his; he has the front-row view of her sincere determination as she bites her lip again. Not hard enough to keep tearing the skin, but enough to taste iron. "Feel you leak out of me."
no subject
If Marta has to stop rocking and he has to pause to process that, there's not a lot of movement going on immediately following her statement. "You're looking for a different word than 'torture.'" Ransom's not going to offer alternatives, because that's her business, and it lies somewhere behind an earnestness that does something akin to making his skin crawl. With the hand not currently buried in her cunt he gestures at the otherwise empty bathhouse, between the two of them.
"You've got me to yourself," he says, less romantic than annoyed. "You have what you want."
no subject
At which point she'll become very insistent on the specific wheres and hows of it all, of course.
Until then: head tilted, brow gently furrowed on that earnest face he loves to hate, or at least did for a while. Nowadays, Marta is fairly certain it's managed to get even more complicated than that. "Tell me what words you think I should use?" They've both been still for a while, she realizes, and moves her hand very deliberately upward and then down again. "I have you to myself. What I want... is your happiness."
Something he is distinctly denying himself, isn't he?
no subject
"I should've just drowned myself. Don't think 'cause you've got my cock in your hand that's off the table." He sighs and thrusts his fingers into her cunt punishingly. "Marta. I have been out for one day." And, wryly, "My needs have gotten a lot simpler. It would make me delirious with joy to feel you come. How about we let that be good enough?"
no subject
But, look, she can communicate her intentions before the words reach her. By shaking her head very decisively no and not breaking eye contact.
Her hand does go still. She hadn't realized that he hadn't realized, after all.
"If you don't come, I don't want to. Not for the first time." What was that thing he repeated from Benoit? "In for a penny, in for a pound."
no subject
He pulls his fingers out of her with a huffed laugh. Lets his hand splash quietly in the water, rinse away the slickness. "That wasn't a stipulation." But he doesn't really expect an answer to this either. He's a little surprised but realizes he shouldn't be. Maybe impatient in the moment, but self-aware about it, and this is the girl who'd intended to wait for him to get out of prison.
"Do you want it to be special, Marta?" Both palms pressed to the bench now.
The question is mocking, sure, but there's also something genuinely pitying to it. He can make it good, especially knowing they have the same idea of what good entails, but he can't be that for her. Ultimately he'll seek his own pleasure, and it won't be anything more than sex. He's just not built that way.
no subject
She can feel how it unsettles him. "I know. You didn't trick me into it." But it matters, to him, so it matters to her. Together, now or together, not now. The together part cannot be extracted from the rest. It feels like it could be considered by others as an extreme, except for the part where Marta remembers that everyone else he's ever known clearly picked the not at all... with no other caveats... at every given opportunity.
"If I say no, I don't want it to be special. It's because you say special like it's a Christmas candy. Too sweet, too syrupy. Sticks to the roof of the mouth. And I don't want that. And if I say yes, that it will be special to me. Because it's you. You will go back into the water. So I'm not saying either." Marta takes a breath and forces herself to stand, putting her hands on his shoulders to balance as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other.
no subject
He leans forward before she can put too much distance between them, as though to kiss her. "That's not the only option," he says, nearly against her lips. She hasn't yet gained her footing on the bottom of the bath, and he shoots a hand down to grab her ankle before she can lower it — the other he wraps his leg around, yanking her off balance, and uses his free hand to push her down. Pushing her under the water with one hand, dragging her down with the other.
He keeps hold for two seconds, maybe three. But that's enough Mississippis for anyone when the hands holding you down have already tried to kill you once.
He lets go, and by the time she comes up he'll already be reaching for some soap. He did come here for a bath, after all.
no subject
Bites back the strong desire to kick him in the ankle by the time she's sat up, because it would be pointless. He won't be sorry. He won't even manage falsely chagrined.
"No, of course not. You could try to kill me, again, because you're having a tantrum that I care." Marta rolls her eyes and climbs to her feet, simultaneously shifting far enough away that he'd have to stand if he wanted to reach her. Not that she thinks he does. "Because you think that means you've lost."
There's also soap over here, so. She picks it up and turns it over in her hands and doesn't look at him. If he wants to have a tantrum, that's fine. Marta's not going to pretend he doesn't exist as a result, but she's not going to beg him for a different sort of attention otherwise. "Sounds a little like a form in triplicate. How many copies do we need?"
no subject
It's utterly belied by the angry scratch of his nails over his scalp, working the shampoo in as perfunctorily as he ever did at Norfolk with a line of half a dozen convicts waiting on the other side of the stall. Not that he didn't take as long as he needed, but if there was any pleasure to be had from the experience, that sucked it right out. His first real shower, bath, whatever in a year and he just wants it over with.
"I think we have enough paperwork between us, don't you?"
He doesn't give Marta the chance to answer, wrenching on the faucet and ducking underneath. If she's keeping track of his tantrum maybe she'll care to note that he only stays under long enough to rinse his hair, then the cadence of the stream changes as he does stand and the water keeps sluicing into the bath. He moves over to her, running his hand through his hair to flick away the water, and he brackets her in with his arms where she's sitting, pretty and wet and pissed. He wants to be immune to all of it but knows better by now. He's managing it.
"You don't know why I went in the water, Marta. You don't know every reason for what I do. You make it sound so beautiful and wise, but you're not right every goddamned time. And it's not your right. Unless you think it is." He searches her face for the indication that she disagrees, that she thinks what she did should give her unimpeded access to his split skull and chest. There's no echo anymore, his voice low enough to be a threat. But Christ help him, he's trying to explain. If she keeps it up he knows himself well enough to know he'll do whatever he has to to prove her wrong, and he'll tear himself apart to do it as much as her. "Just stop. You have to stop."
no subject
Plus worried too, when she stops being petty and irritated and looks into his face instead of at the soap in her hands. Worried about him, for him, more than for herself.
"Okay." No great irritation behind that agreement, although the irritation from being 'dunked', along with frayed nerves, remains. "Sorry." Sincere, even as she drops her eyes and returns her attention to the soap... because she doesn't enjoy this part at all, where they argue or clash at the end of every interaction, it feels like.
no subject
It's just strange to have another person acknowledge that.
Now would normally be where he stopped replying, turned off the phone to let her simmer in her own juices (one way or another) until he alone decided it was time to resume the conversation. But she's still here, Ransom staring (still) down at the top of her head. He settles for moving away so he can continue to clean up. And it is different, because if this is happening and how it will continue to happen, then this isn't the end of anything. Just now, or not now.