#HATE being theyed in a plural way

[etruatcaelum]

The question stops whirling thoughts dead in their tracks; Ozma, too, ossifies where they stand—eyes flickering wide, then tightly closed. Right. Not old news for the old bird who’d spent more or less the same amount of time locked away in the cage of a different friend-become-foe. Hardly at the forefront of anyone’s mind when Qrow and the others made it to what passes for home these days.

They rub their eyes. (Oscar’s eyes.) “I don’t know that Salem ever talks to anyone except in person.” As inappropriately-timed stabs at levity go, it’s a feeble one. But not so feeble they can’t run it further into the ground. “Not the most sociable.”

It’s fine. They’re fine. The sad song of this rotten thing in their chest will be strangled again in due course by their curse, and then—they will not feel better, but they will feel less. Diminished, as she put it. Near to forty lifetimes now of going through the motions. Their palliative fog.

Ozma lurches into motion again, prowling restively to the tiny window. On the other side of the scratched and pitted glass, Vacuo rambles out in masses of clay and canvas, claustrophobic—and beyond that, the boundless hostility of rust-colored sand which had eaten paradise piecemeal after they pried the staff from its tree.

Not for the first time, they wonder what Salem would see if she stood here. If she would look upon their works and find more than despair. Or if despair would look to her more like a feast: they never did find a delicate way to ask how thoroughly the darkness had changed her.

“She captured us—well, me, I don’t think she knew Oscar was still alive until he spoke to her—within about,” a wince, “two hours after delivering the siege. Evidently she’s gotten anxious enough about what I’ve done to the Beacon vault to suffer my presence again. Although she did delegate most of the unpleasantness to Hazel.” All told, and excluding the dramatics before she’d ripped down the hard-light fortifications like so much tissue paper, Salem had given them perhaps seven or eight minutes of her time in the span of those two days. Ozma scoffs. “Frankly it went quite a lot better than the last time we saw each other face-to-face. Or—well,” they mutter sourly, “you saw what happened the time before that.”

words do mean something, actually, when they're the right ones. when they're meaningful. Oz staying and saying anything at all after that question instead of leaving qrow in loneliness means everything.

though, in thousands would he know, and in an instant he realizes this voice no longer rings of Ozpin, not really. of course, Ozpin had never fully existed as Ozpin either, had he? and Oscar's still in there now, as he so often liked to remind. life and existence get messy and interwoven like that, like a braid; he's combed the knots out of other people before, if only to steady himself better in the layers of it.

Raven used to twitch and snap like this, too, but the broken humanity of unhinged rants and laughter wring around qrow's heart enough to wince every time.

he may have already confronted his apathy in a wine cellar abyss, but the echoes of its spiraling silence stated aloud stings.

a sigh deflates weary lungs as he leans back against the wall between Oz going off and that little whisper. sand catches wrong under the sole of his shoe, but instead of slipping, he slides along with it; hips scuff down to sit him on the floor with long legs sprawled, adding a new snag to his cape. more holes in the garment of a hero.

but that sigh also rushes as a breath of relief; a scarecrow sits down. Ozma releases the reaping that lifetimes and lies have sown up to this moment. he need not explain cycles to a harbinger of harvest, nor the near-impossible necessity of breaking them to a recovering alcoholic. he speaks as freely as he should have all long, had he not withheld knowledge from the corvid at his side. Oz owns up to uncertainty, now - a new look, for sure, but vermillion eyes never leave him, waiting out the storm and the story, and the joke apparently, with as much curious wonder as ever.

in all of that, qrow pecks at the tiniest, though admittedly tastiest crumb, "...you talked t'her? ...Salem? ...in person?" ...and escaped? goes unspoken.

damn, of course he's not alright.