Ravindra Savarna (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
paladont) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
zenderael_mmo2013-05-03 07:53 pm
paladont) wrote in zenderael_mmo2013-05-03 07:53 pm
Entry tags:
[Ravindra] - Desecration
Who: Ravindra
When: 8/11, Thursday
Where: Bastan
Before/After: After allied victory in Bastan, and after finding out Alex was killed by Jordan.
Warnings: Angst & depression & man rogues are dicks
So much had changed in such a short span of time. That morning, the allied victory had left Ravindra in good spirits--positively elated, really--and now, just hours later, it seemed impossible to think he might ever be anything but miserable.
There was so much he’d been looking forward to now that Bastan had been reclaimed. Reuniting with the paladins who’d been trapped under the occupation, the simple familiarity of walking through the streets of his home city, getting to spend the night in his own room, his own bed. But now, all he could see were the paladins who weren’t there to reunite with, and the parts of the city that had been destroyed in the fighting or altered in the occupation. Everything seemed hopelessly different and it was impossible to restore things to the way they’d been before Aerveas had invaded. Everything he’d looked forward to was wrong.
His room, though--his room would be okay. That was his safe haven. It was small and cluttered and comfortable and it was his and it was home. He’d sleep in his own bed tonight and wake up in his city and put on his proper armour to go help his people. It would be all the comfortable familiar things he’d missed, and maybe--maybe losing Alex wouldn’t sting quite so much with those comforts to shield him.
He’d parted from Iravati and Chisaki to return through the city gates and make his way toward the barracks. There was still work to be done today, but no shortage of available bodies to do it, so he didn’t feel guilty for giving up on the rest of the day. He’d hole up in his room until morning and feel terrible by himself where no one would notice and then he’d be out here tomorrow to do what needed to be done, and then after that he’d go to Stonecaster and check on Reilanin.
Along the way, comrades stopped to ask after his sullen look, or the spear he carried, or just to tell him to cheer up because hadn’t they won? He responded noncommittally to all of them, ‘later’ or ‘it’s fine’ or ‘don’t worry about it’ or ‘I’m just tired.’ Disengaging without explaining, because he couldn’t explain, how could you explain ‘I just found out the Mano was my boyfriend’s player and she murdered him and his spear is all I have left and by the way the Mano is dead because his girlfriend killed her when she found out’?
The space around the barracks was crowded, people milling around, talking, planning. Nobody bothered him there, though; people were also coming and going through the doors and those gathered outside seemed to respect that the ones going in probably just wanted to get back into their rooms as soon as possible without getting pulled aside to chat. He skirted around the crowd and slipped inside, into the familiar hallway, breathing out his relief when he saw it relatively unchanged. There was some graffiti on the walls, but a handful of paladins had already organized themselves and set to the task of scrubbing it out.
He followed the bends of the hallway that led to his room, down at the end, facing the back of the building. After years of this being his home, this being the path he took at the end of every night, it was still so ingrained in him that he followed it on auto-pilot. It was a small comfort that his time away couldn’t erase that.
He got to his room and leaned against the door to dig out his key, but the instant his shoulder settled against it, the door gave way under his weight. He stumbled into the room, caught himself with a hand around the edge of the door, and paused for a moment, stunned.
He definitely had not left the door unlocked when he’d left for the tournament the morning of the invasion, much less left it open. He swallowed down a rising flutter of dread, lifting his gaze to look over his room.
The mattress had been shoved halfway off the bed, blankets pooled on the floor. The drawers of his desk and nightstand had been pulled out and dumped on the floor along with their contents. The bookshelf had been yanked out, because it’d been inconveniently placed so that you had to get down on your knees and reach in between the shelf and the desk to get things out of the bottom corner, and half its contents were on the floor while the other half had been shoved around on the shelves. Even the blanket Mittens slept on had been shaken out and tossed haphazardly onto the mattress, and the clothes from his closet and footlocker were strewn around the floor.
He stood there a moment, staring. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t even upset. It was so overwhelming that he couldn’t possibly contain all the feelings needed to react properly, so he just...didn’t.
He adjusted his grip on the spear, fingers tightening around the shaft, and forced himself to take a step into the room. His motions slow and measured, he set the spear in the corner beside the door where he kept his armour. The corner’s emptiness escaped his current notice.
He pushed the door shut behind him. It didn’t click. He glanced back and saw that the wood of the doorjamb had been broken so that there was nothing for the latch to catch on.
He took a deep breath, a sliver of something making it through the numbness, and left the door to assess the rest of the damage.
The closet door hung open; he peered inside. All his clothes were on the floor, scattered both inside the closet and out. His dress shoes were gone, along with the few suits he’d owned; the rest, he’d have to gather up to take inventory of.
He turned away to kneel by the footlocker. The lock had been broken off. He lifted the lid to check inside, and didn’t have to dig very long to know that his savings were gone, along with anything that could’ve been pawned for a few coppers.
That sliver of something rose into a surge of anger threaded with despair. He slammed down the lid and stood, this time moving to the nightstand and kneeling beside the drawer that had been dumped. His tobacco was gone. Of course. The cigarettes Virelai had given him, too. He shoved the drawer back into its proper place, and then did the same with the drawers of the desk. Half of them gave him trouble, not resting properly on the runners on the first or second try, so he had to yank them back out and try again, which only frustrated him.
It all frustrated him. He just took it out on the drawers, the last two getting slammed shut once he’d finally managed to put them in properly seated. He didn’t get up this time, remaining crouched on the floor beside his desk. He set his head against his knees and breathed, the sound husky past the tightness in his throat, but he was the only one there to hear it.
Stupid. He was an idiot. He’d always been an idiot, so that was no great surprise. The city had been swarming with rogues and he hadn’t just once stopped to think that maybe they would have ransacked the paladin barracks for valuables? How could he possibly have believed that he’d just be able to walk into his room and find it untouched, just the same as the day he’d left it?
Even his armour had been stolen, because he realized now that it hadn’t been in the corner when he’d put the spear there, and it wasn’t in the closet, and it wasn’t among the possessions scattered across the floor. That had probably not been sold, and he felt sick with the surge of outrage and hate that rose up at the thought that his armour had gone to one of Aerveas’s warriors to be used against his own allies. The armour he’d donned every day to protect Bastan, or to help train Bastan’s future protectors. The armour he’d spent countless resources on, both money and time, to ensure had a set of enchantments perfectly suited to his healing style. All his hard work, and some fucking rogue had swiped it right out of his room so it could be worn by someone who would use it against everything it stood for. It probably didn’t even fit them right.
This victory just kept feeling more and more hollow. First he’d lost Alex, and now he couldn’t even find solace in finally reclaiming his space. It wasn't the material loss that upset him so much as the invasion. A person's private space held a certain sanctity. To intrude on that, to trample it, to so thoroughly violate it--that felt, almost, sacrilegious.
He was done with today. He couldn’t handle this. He couldn’t take any more bad news. He shoved himself to his feet, grabbing his chair from the floor to drag it over to the door. He set it down and shoved it right up against the door to keep it flush with the doorjamb, every action harsh and forceful. He tore off his gloves, fumbled with the clasps of his bracers until he managed those too, and stripped out of his armour piece by piece, just tossing it onto the floor without care for where it ended up.
When he was down to the uniform he wore underneath, he shoved his mattress back into its proper place and threw himself down on it. He lay glowering at the blank wall across from the door, his arms folded, feeling desolate and hopeless and hateful and lonely and angry and powerless and stupid and unloved and a million other things that may or may not have made any sense. He wanted to talk to someone. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted to cry. He wanted to flip the furniture. He wanted to hunt down whoever had felt money was more important than another person’s privacy and property and throw them off a cliff. He wanted Alex back. He wanted to be in Stonecaster with Reilanin because that, too, felt like home, and that hadn’t been sacked by rogues. He didn’t want Reilanin to have to bear the force of his grief when she needed someone who could offer her support for her own. He wanted Mittens to be here because at least he never felt completely worthless when he had her around.
Most of all, he just wanted to not exist right now. He thought back to Acher’s sword pinning him to the ground and felt like everything would have been better if he’d just let himself die instead of fighting back. He wouldn’t have to be dealing with any of this right now if he had.
He let his feelings roil for who even knew how long, doing nothing to rationalize himself out of the self-destructive circles his thoughts chased themselves in. When his eyes refused to focus, he closed them. When his thoughts refused to focus, he let them go. Eventually, everything coalesced into a sea of unspecific ‘upset’, and he was too drained to figure out what feelings were actually tied up in that, so he just let it be.
Some time after that, he finally drifted off to sleep. Instead of peaceful non-existence, it was restless and filled with troubling dreams. Not even something as simple as sleeping could go right for him today.
Ravindra had always been an early riser, but he didn't get up the next morning until long after the sun had made its way above the horizon. He slept fitfully and every time he roused, he forced himself back to sleep. He didn't want to wake up and deal with the world. The world where murderous players were rewarded with god-organs. The world where his safe spaces could be so thoroughly invaded. The world where his people could secure such a decisive victory and it could feel like a crushing defeat. The world without Alex.
But eventually, he found himself fully aware and wide awake, unable to drift back into unconsciousness. He gave up after thirty minutes of trying, and reluctantly got up. He sat at the edge of his bed, looked out at the mess that had been made of his room, and let out a sigh. He couldn't even find it in himself to be angry about it anymore. He was just resigned. Wasn't this kind of thing just his luck?
He pushed himself up and started piecing his ransacked room back together. He moved sluggishly, but it didn't matter. He didn't have anywhere else to be. With the fighting done, what difference did it make if one paladin decided to stay in his room all day and boycott life?
He gathered up all his clothes, sorted them, hung them back in the closet. Then he tended to the bookshelf, pulling everything off the floor around it first so he could shove it back into its proper place, inconvenient access to the lower-right shelves and all. He didn't feel like re-organizing what remained of his possessions, though. Sorting through his clothes had been a massive enough undertaking for one day, he just didn't have the energy to do anything more than get everything off the floor and leave it on top of his desk for later.
When he picked up an ugly wooden lump that vaguely resembled a cat, he went still, holding it cupped in his hands. The carving Iravati had made for his sixteenth birthday, that she hadn't been able to give him until they'd reunited...when Missie had created her. He wasn't surprised to find it hadn't been taken. It was objectively hideous, monetarily worthless.
When he saw it, he thought of a fourteen-year-old Iravati diligently carving away at a lump of wood until it vaguely resembled a cat, congratulating herself for being amazing once she was done. And then he thought of her keeping it for fourteen years, growing increasingly embarrassed every year as it sank in how bad it was, but still giving it to him fourteen years late anyway.
He smiled. It was weary and weak, but it was genuine.
He could stand losing everything else he owned, so long as this vaguely cat-shaped lump remained. This was his most precious possession. It wasn't worth a single copper except as tinder, but it could make him smile when he felt like there was nothing in the world to smile about anymore.
That was more valuable than all the gold in the world.
When: 8/11, Thursday
Where: Bastan
Before/After: After allied victory in Bastan, and after finding out Alex was killed by Jordan.
Warnings: Angst & depression & man rogues are dicks
So much had changed in such a short span of time. That morning, the allied victory had left Ravindra in good spirits--positively elated, really--and now, just hours later, it seemed impossible to think he might ever be anything but miserable.
There was so much he’d been looking forward to now that Bastan had been reclaimed. Reuniting with the paladins who’d been trapped under the occupation, the simple familiarity of walking through the streets of his home city, getting to spend the night in his own room, his own bed. But now, all he could see were the paladins who weren’t there to reunite with, and the parts of the city that had been destroyed in the fighting or altered in the occupation. Everything seemed hopelessly different and it was impossible to restore things to the way they’d been before Aerveas had invaded. Everything he’d looked forward to was wrong.
His room, though--his room would be okay. That was his safe haven. It was small and cluttered and comfortable and it was his and it was home. He’d sleep in his own bed tonight and wake up in his city and put on his proper armour to go help his people. It would be all the comfortable familiar things he’d missed, and maybe--maybe losing Alex wouldn’t sting quite so much with those comforts to shield him.
He’d parted from Iravati and Chisaki to return through the city gates and make his way toward the barracks. There was still work to be done today, but no shortage of available bodies to do it, so he didn’t feel guilty for giving up on the rest of the day. He’d hole up in his room until morning and feel terrible by himself where no one would notice and then he’d be out here tomorrow to do what needed to be done, and then after that he’d go to Stonecaster and check on Reilanin.
Along the way, comrades stopped to ask after his sullen look, or the spear he carried, or just to tell him to cheer up because hadn’t they won? He responded noncommittally to all of them, ‘later’ or ‘it’s fine’ or ‘don’t worry about it’ or ‘I’m just tired.’ Disengaging without explaining, because he couldn’t explain, how could you explain ‘I just found out the Mano was my boyfriend’s player and she murdered him and his spear is all I have left and by the way the Mano is dead because his girlfriend killed her when she found out’?
The space around the barracks was crowded, people milling around, talking, planning. Nobody bothered him there, though; people were also coming and going through the doors and those gathered outside seemed to respect that the ones going in probably just wanted to get back into their rooms as soon as possible without getting pulled aside to chat. He skirted around the crowd and slipped inside, into the familiar hallway, breathing out his relief when he saw it relatively unchanged. There was some graffiti on the walls, but a handful of paladins had already organized themselves and set to the task of scrubbing it out.
He followed the bends of the hallway that led to his room, down at the end, facing the back of the building. After years of this being his home, this being the path he took at the end of every night, it was still so ingrained in him that he followed it on auto-pilot. It was a small comfort that his time away couldn’t erase that.
He got to his room and leaned against the door to dig out his key, but the instant his shoulder settled against it, the door gave way under his weight. He stumbled into the room, caught himself with a hand around the edge of the door, and paused for a moment, stunned.
He definitely had not left the door unlocked when he’d left for the tournament the morning of the invasion, much less left it open. He swallowed down a rising flutter of dread, lifting his gaze to look over his room.
The mattress had been shoved halfway off the bed, blankets pooled on the floor. The drawers of his desk and nightstand had been pulled out and dumped on the floor along with their contents. The bookshelf had been yanked out, because it’d been inconveniently placed so that you had to get down on your knees and reach in between the shelf and the desk to get things out of the bottom corner, and half its contents were on the floor while the other half had been shoved around on the shelves. Even the blanket Mittens slept on had been shaken out and tossed haphazardly onto the mattress, and the clothes from his closet and footlocker were strewn around the floor.
He stood there a moment, staring. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t even upset. It was so overwhelming that he couldn’t possibly contain all the feelings needed to react properly, so he just...didn’t.
He adjusted his grip on the spear, fingers tightening around the shaft, and forced himself to take a step into the room. His motions slow and measured, he set the spear in the corner beside the door where he kept his armour. The corner’s emptiness escaped his current notice.
He pushed the door shut behind him. It didn’t click. He glanced back and saw that the wood of the doorjamb had been broken so that there was nothing for the latch to catch on.
He took a deep breath, a sliver of something making it through the numbness, and left the door to assess the rest of the damage.
The closet door hung open; he peered inside. All his clothes were on the floor, scattered both inside the closet and out. His dress shoes were gone, along with the few suits he’d owned; the rest, he’d have to gather up to take inventory of.
He turned away to kneel by the footlocker. The lock had been broken off. He lifted the lid to check inside, and didn’t have to dig very long to know that his savings were gone, along with anything that could’ve been pawned for a few coppers.
That sliver of something rose into a surge of anger threaded with despair. He slammed down the lid and stood, this time moving to the nightstand and kneeling beside the drawer that had been dumped. His tobacco was gone. Of course. The cigarettes Virelai had given him, too. He shoved the drawer back into its proper place, and then did the same with the drawers of the desk. Half of them gave him trouble, not resting properly on the runners on the first or second try, so he had to yank them back out and try again, which only frustrated him.
It all frustrated him. He just took it out on the drawers, the last two getting slammed shut once he’d finally managed to put them in properly seated. He didn’t get up this time, remaining crouched on the floor beside his desk. He set his head against his knees and breathed, the sound husky past the tightness in his throat, but he was the only one there to hear it.
Stupid. He was an idiot. He’d always been an idiot, so that was no great surprise. The city had been swarming with rogues and he hadn’t just once stopped to think that maybe they would have ransacked the paladin barracks for valuables? How could he possibly have believed that he’d just be able to walk into his room and find it untouched, just the same as the day he’d left it?
Even his armour had been stolen, because he realized now that it hadn’t been in the corner when he’d put the spear there, and it wasn’t in the closet, and it wasn’t among the possessions scattered across the floor. That had probably not been sold, and he felt sick with the surge of outrage and hate that rose up at the thought that his armour had gone to one of Aerveas’s warriors to be used against his own allies. The armour he’d donned every day to protect Bastan, or to help train Bastan’s future protectors. The armour he’d spent countless resources on, both money and time, to ensure had a set of enchantments perfectly suited to his healing style. All his hard work, and some fucking rogue had swiped it right out of his room so it could be worn by someone who would use it against everything it stood for. It probably didn’t even fit them right.
This victory just kept feeling more and more hollow. First he’d lost Alex, and now he couldn’t even find solace in finally reclaiming his space. It wasn't the material loss that upset him so much as the invasion. A person's private space held a certain sanctity. To intrude on that, to trample it, to so thoroughly violate it--that felt, almost, sacrilegious.
He was done with today. He couldn’t handle this. He couldn’t take any more bad news. He shoved himself to his feet, grabbing his chair from the floor to drag it over to the door. He set it down and shoved it right up against the door to keep it flush with the doorjamb, every action harsh and forceful. He tore off his gloves, fumbled with the clasps of his bracers until he managed those too, and stripped out of his armour piece by piece, just tossing it onto the floor without care for where it ended up.
When he was down to the uniform he wore underneath, he shoved his mattress back into its proper place and threw himself down on it. He lay glowering at the blank wall across from the door, his arms folded, feeling desolate and hopeless and hateful and lonely and angry and powerless and stupid and unloved and a million other things that may or may not have made any sense. He wanted to talk to someone. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted to cry. He wanted to flip the furniture. He wanted to hunt down whoever had felt money was more important than another person’s privacy and property and throw them off a cliff. He wanted Alex back. He wanted to be in Stonecaster with Reilanin because that, too, felt like home, and that hadn’t been sacked by rogues. He didn’t want Reilanin to have to bear the force of his grief when she needed someone who could offer her support for her own. He wanted Mittens to be here because at least he never felt completely worthless when he had her around.
Most of all, he just wanted to not exist right now. He thought back to Acher’s sword pinning him to the ground and felt like everything would have been better if he’d just let himself die instead of fighting back. He wouldn’t have to be dealing with any of this right now if he had.
He let his feelings roil for who even knew how long, doing nothing to rationalize himself out of the self-destructive circles his thoughts chased themselves in. When his eyes refused to focus, he closed them. When his thoughts refused to focus, he let them go. Eventually, everything coalesced into a sea of unspecific ‘upset’, and he was too drained to figure out what feelings were actually tied up in that, so he just let it be.
Some time after that, he finally drifted off to sleep. Instead of peaceful non-existence, it was restless and filled with troubling dreams. Not even something as simple as sleeping could go right for him today.
Ravindra had always been an early riser, but he didn't get up the next morning until long after the sun had made its way above the horizon. He slept fitfully and every time he roused, he forced himself back to sleep. He didn't want to wake up and deal with the world. The world where murderous players were rewarded with god-organs. The world where his safe spaces could be so thoroughly invaded. The world where his people could secure such a decisive victory and it could feel like a crushing defeat. The world without Alex.
But eventually, he found himself fully aware and wide awake, unable to drift back into unconsciousness. He gave up after thirty minutes of trying, and reluctantly got up. He sat at the edge of his bed, looked out at the mess that had been made of his room, and let out a sigh. He couldn't even find it in himself to be angry about it anymore. He was just resigned. Wasn't this kind of thing just his luck?
He pushed himself up and started piecing his ransacked room back together. He moved sluggishly, but it didn't matter. He didn't have anywhere else to be. With the fighting done, what difference did it make if one paladin decided to stay in his room all day and boycott life?
He gathered up all his clothes, sorted them, hung them back in the closet. Then he tended to the bookshelf, pulling everything off the floor around it first so he could shove it back into its proper place, inconvenient access to the lower-right shelves and all. He didn't feel like re-organizing what remained of his possessions, though. Sorting through his clothes had been a massive enough undertaking for one day, he just didn't have the energy to do anything more than get everything off the floor and leave it on top of his desk for later.
When he picked up an ugly wooden lump that vaguely resembled a cat, he went still, holding it cupped in his hands. The carving Iravati had made for his sixteenth birthday, that she hadn't been able to give him until they'd reunited...when Missie had created her. He wasn't surprised to find it hadn't been taken. It was objectively hideous, monetarily worthless.
When he saw it, he thought of a fourteen-year-old Iravati diligently carving away at a lump of wood until it vaguely resembled a cat, congratulating herself for being amazing once she was done. And then he thought of her keeping it for fourteen years, growing increasingly embarrassed every year as it sank in how bad it was, but still giving it to him fourteen years late anyway.
He smiled. It was weary and weak, but it was genuine.
He could stand losing everything else he owned, so long as this vaguely cat-shaped lump remained. This was his most precious possession. It wasn't worth a single copper except as tinder, but it could make him smile when he felt like there was nothing in the world to smile about anymore.
That was more valuable than all the gold in the world.