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Yuri is, unfortunately, deeply familiar with the situation he's found himself in - alone somewhere dark, in pain. It's disorienting, but he struggles through it, trying to ignore the mantra of ow ow ow that beats in time with his human heart.

Sodia'd stabbed him. Once upon a time, only a few months back - yeah, he would have expected that from her. She's cute and bright with poison seeping underneath; from the moment Flynn had resonated with her, he'd been expecting one of her daggers in his back. He couldn't quite fathom why she'd done it now, though. He thought they'd been getting along better, and Alexei had been right there, monologuing!

A deep throb from the wound in his side, and he winces. For a flesh eater, he knows, he's lucky. Stable on an unheard of level, one of the few with - as of yet - no noticeable downsides to his genetic disconnection from the mystical OS all pure blades are a part of. Still...he's a flesh eater. He's able to survive wounds that would kill a human, and heal faster from said wounds as well, but. It's still not quite the efficiency of healing a blade would get. This stab wound isn't going to kill him, but it's going to be a right pain in the ass for a while, especially since Estelle doesn't seem to be anywhere near him.

Speaking of: where is he?

At first, he hadn't really paid it much mind, because he'd been distracted by the pain, but the aer here - wherever 'here' is - is fucking weird.

He tries to ping Estelle; a flesh eater's connection to the blade network is fucking shoddy at best, but he's her driver. He's got a direct line to her.

The ping hits dead aer. It doesn't bounce back, like it would if she was offline, or being held in some sort of containment chamber, like the blastia Alexei had chained her in. He knows what that feels like. He'd spent their entire frantic, worried journey to rescue her just reaching out for their resonance again and again and again. This...is nothing like that.

This is absolutely not the right time to be panicking, but when it comes to logic, Yuri has always been contrarian. He's panicking.

He really, really wishes he had Repede with him right now. This place is freaky, and the aer is weird, so he's kind of glad Estelle isn't with him (though he sure does wish he could fucking feel her, all the same) but, man. He just wants his dog. Repede's cool head has always prevailed where Yuri's sense has failed him.

He squeezes his eyes shut, and clenches his jaw, and forces himself not to cry as he forces himself to his knees. His head swims, and for the first time, through the darkness, he takes in the vague details of the room he's in.

Huh. This, too, is unfortunately familiar, in a way that would be far more amusing to him at...pretty much any other time, really.

He's in a cell.

What the fuck.

He tries to rewind events in his mind. They'd fought, they'd won, but at the same time, they'd taken losses. Namely: him, when Sodia had fucking shanked him and sent him tumbling over the edge. After that - panic, the fall, and water.

Had...had Alexei scooped him up? It wouldn't be the first time Yuri had found himself in his custody, though there was a comforting lack of non-consensual surgery involved in this round. So far.

Panic bubbles back up at the edges of his mind again. He tries to beat it down. He fucking hates being locked up, but usually it's totally easy to ignore. The potential of this also involving Alexei has his mind running around in frantic circles like a very distressed ratwigle.

It's because of that panic, he thinks, that he doesn't realise there are people heading his way until they are literally right in front of him. They look human, he thinks, and it has him tensing...

He's in no condition to fight. Doesn't mean he won't, if they force the issue (humans, generally, will force the issue, he's found).

"Well?" he says, with a bravado he may not feel, but has sure as hell perfected, "all this effort to invite me over, and you're not going to keep me company? And here I've been, just itching for a nice chat over tea..."

Now that they're closer, Jade can tell that not only does this blade have a power level easily on par with every other Aegis he knows, but also the tang of the ether is just-off in the way that speaks of flesh eater. So, that certainly is something he's going to have to unpack later. Surprise and concern hit the emotion bleed for Asch to feel, but otherwise Jade keeps his face even.

"Tea might have to wait until we're out of here, I'm afraid," he tells the blade in the cell, matching joke for joke.

He steps forward to examine the cell door, trusting that they haven't missed any guards and if they have Asch will tell him as such. The door in question is sturdy, locked with a simple padlock -- brute force might do the lock in just fine, but it's made of ether resistant material, so it's brute force or nothing. Or rather...

"I don't suppose you swiped a key off of a guard, did you?" Jade says, looking towards Asch.

Asch rolls his eyes and then rolls one shoulder. "No, but I'm a bastard of many talents. Scoot."

Talents which apparently include lock picking, considering the fine pieces of metal he pulls out of the pocket strapped to his leg. Worst case scenario, he can make Jade make a key - the handy thing about ice ether is that it's the easiest kind to make a physical object from - but they're unlikely to need it.

Sure enough, the lock pops open with hardly any fiddling, almost supernaturally fast. (He could have done it even faster, actually, but then the supernatural nature of his skills would be too obvious. Some cards are played close to his chest by default.)

"We've got enough time for a breather, but not much," he says to the blade in the cell as he wiggles the lock out of the door. "Unless you'd rather stay, but the assholes in charge here definitely don't believe in tea parties."

One hand comes up to grip the opposite wrist tightly, fidgeting as he runs through scenarios in his mind. Closer now, and calmer - these men aren't human, actually, he thinks. The one who had snarked back at him (the thing about them that had him relaxing the most, to be honest, no human would be making jokes with a flesh eater prisoner) had a taste to his aer that stirred something familiar in the back of his mind - Dahngrest, he thinks, even though the man himself is completely unknown to him.

It's the words of the other one that finally get him moving. "Leaving sounds like a grand idea," he says, and then gestures down at himself. "I'm going to need a little help, though. I'm slightly stabbed." He could probably force himself to his feet and get out of here under his own power now that the cell is open, but. Well. If they've gone this far to crack said cell open, may as well see how far they'll go to actually get him out of it, right?

Good. He knew Asch would have a solution for that, one way or another.

To Yuri: "Sounds like a personal problem," Jade quips on reflex, because of course that's the proper response to someone mentioning they've been stabbed; but immediately he turns to Asch. "Do we have time to heal him? It would be faster if one of us doesn't have to carry him out--" (by 'one of us' he means, actually, himself. Better to let the dark blade with hyper-intuition lead the way, in Jade's opinion,) "--but we'll manage, I suppose."

"Patch job yes, organ damage no," Asch responds on autopilot, intuition leading the way just far enough for him to realize what he's said after he's said it. He gives first Jade, then Yuri, a dull, dead look. It really is too much to ask for the world to give him a relationship with a single normal blade, huh. "And since you've only got one organ to damage and it would probably kill you if it got stabbed, I assume it's a patch job."

"Pretty sure my heart is nowhere near my lower ribs," Yuri confirms, trying for a grin. Now that it's been said, actually, there's a little relief in it - if she hadn't been aiming for his heart, Sodia probably hadn't been trying to kill him? Of course, the other options are that she was, and she wanted it to be slow, or she just doesn't know that the best way to get at the heart is not to slide a dagger between two of the lower ribs, which would be kind of concerning for her not to know, considering she's Flynn's blade and she's meant to protect him.

His head swims a little, and he blinks, turning back to the redhead. "Just a patch job is fine...?" He trails off leadingly, hoping for an introduction.

While Yuri's talking, Asch takes it upon himself to come into the cell and come close enough to actually do his healing job. This close, light ether comes trickling to the forefront, touched by fire at the edges. "Asch," he offers, "and the ominous bastard is Jade of the Crimson Snow."

Yes, he's titledropping you, Jade, he doesn't get all that many chances to embarrass you with it. "Lean forward if you can," he says to Yuri instead, the warm ether gathering to his fingertips. "It's easier if I can see what I'm doing."

Jade idly adjusts his glasses to hide the roll of his eyes, as if either Yuri or Asch is paying attention to him at the moment.

"Am I the ominious one now? And here I thought that title better fit the one in this resonance prone to startling everyone by appearing from the shadows on a whim."

His tone is dry, but he is fond.

Otherwise, Jade keeps his mouth shut and his attention down the hallway, just in case a guard wants to make the rounds. Better not risk distracting Asch while he's healing.

Yuri isn't quite sure how to read these two - neither of them seem malicious, in aer or vocal intent, but there's a certain Just Another Tuesday vibe to them as they go about breaking him out of a cell that has his brain going huh. They can't possibly have experience breaking flesh eaters out of cells, because they don't really end up in cells to begin with. The unlucky bastards who don't get to Dahngrest just get dead.

He keeps his eyes on Jade of the Ominous Title while the redhead - Asch - steps in close and gets to work on patching up the hole Sodia left in his side. "I'm Yuri," he offers, as he leans forward as much as he's able, because it's always better to listen to a healer, lest they bonk you on the head, and Asch is at least good at pretending he knows what he's doing.

(Yuri would normally be able to have a feel for sure on whether or not Asch knew what he was doing, but for some reason, since he woke up, his generally accurate gut feelings haven't been gnawing on him like they usually are. Sodia hadn't wounded him anywhere near his core crystal, but maybe the fall had damaged it somehow? He gingerly tests his wrist again - no pain.)

"Crimson Snow, huh?" He asks, light and conversational, as he directs his question to Jade; best not to distract the man healing him while he works. He makes sure to keep his voice low, too - he's very aware, of course, that guards could appear at any moment. "That an inside joke, or...?" Because Yuri is very, very sure, that the only blade with a title is Estelle. Estellise of Midday's Glory, Zaphias' Fatal Angel.

He's never known of another blade with such fame - blades aren't even named in human histories. Especially not when said blade is also, from the taste of his aer that strikes a familiar note of home against Yuri's own, a flesh eater.

Literally nothing that's happened since he woke up has made any sense, and he no longer thinks it's simply that the pain from the stab wound has him off his game.

It bears a quiet, frantic rethinking as he waits for Asch to finish healing him and Jade to answer: where is he?

Edited 2021-04-02 12:46 (UTC)

It'll soon be obvious that he does know what he's doing - Yuri's shirt gets pulled away from the wound carefully, and the ether-blood mixture doesn't seem to bother him any. It's less weirdly colored than some of the other flesh eaters he's met.

(He doesn't think about blood a pale, foggy imitation of red, of a core crystal grey just shy of white. Not in front of a stranger. Jade doesn't count.)

The good news is that blades, even flesh eaters, are easier to heal than humans, because he doesn't have to worry about the exact structure of muscles and organs. The heart is intact - everything else can be pulled and knitted together with ether, and that's exactly what it does. The sensation of healing is as rough as Asch's bedside manner; it doesn't itch, but it has that feeling of putting your hand too close to a heater, a dry almost-burn as the wound disappears under the push of a mixture of fire and light ether.

"Oh, he used to be the personal blade of an Emperor," Asch says. "I remind him about it every so often when he's being annoying."

Jade sighs. "It was several hundred years ago. I don't even remember it, and I am certainly not the same blade now as I was then." This is both about said lack of memories and the fact he's had to eat a heart since then, of course. "...the title has a nice ring to it, though."

Asch says 'personal blade of an Emperor' like it's nothing, and maybe to them it is, and Jade is quick to shoot back that this Emperor is, likely, long dead, but...it itches at his brain.

He has, at this point, been a flesh eater for roughly half his life. Three years with a human heart beating in his chest, and three years without. He tends to not think much on those three years that came Before, because then that just leads to him thinking about Flynn and that's not a good time for anyone, but -

Zaphias didn't like its drivers being uneducated. They were so few and far between, it only made sense that they couldn't be seen as lower class. Between patrols and drills and missions, there were endless, annoying lessons. Language, dance, etiquette.

History.

As long as Flynn had been dragged to those damn things, he'd been dragged along. And he had, inadvertently and entirely against his will, ended up absorbing some of what those lessons taught.

There's only one bloodline in all of Terca Lumireis that lays claim to the title of 'Emperor,' and they've been dead zones for close to a millennia. It's...possible Jade's 'several hundred years ago' fell before their fall, but...

Fuck it. He tries to ask, as casually as possibly, isn't this just normal small talk? Of course it is - "so, uh, either you happen to know where we are, exactly? I'd like to know if I can place...well, how badly I've been misplaced."

"The middle of absolutely nowhere, Tethe'alla, year 2521 since the descent of the first Aegises - " Asch rattles off. He tugs once on Yuri's shirt, doing his best to close it over the stab hole. "Want me to pin this together?" he asks, since he's back here.

"If the location name doesn't mean shit to you, I can give you the names of the old cities from the Kimlasca-Malkuth period, but if that doesn't mean anything still..."

He glances up at Jade, over Yuri's leaning-forward form. They don't address what Mythra calls 'the other Jade adventure' directly all that often; the only reason Asch even knows (no one else does, except Malik) is because of the similarities to his own history. But what happens once can happen again, as they say.

Jade meets Asch's gaze and inhales long and slow, displeasure on his face as he catches onto what Asch is implying. Unfortunately, he is inclined to agree-- now that Asch has put the idea in his mind, he recalls that he knew a Yuri, some decades ago. Oh, only in passing, but it's hard to forget a blade as notable as the one who took every opportunity to whistle for his driver and enjoy the confusion he recieved until a dog came trotting up.

Somehow, he doubts this is the same Yuri, for a reason as simple as that Yuri had split his core crystal with said dog, perfectly content to spend the rest of eternity with it.

Resigned, Jade finishes Asch's thought: "Then I suspect you're a long way from home."

Edited (elaborates on a thought bc y'all can't read my mind and i was too ambigious) 2021-04-05 05:59 (UTC)

There's a certain dread to the air now, and - yeah, Yuri gets it, because what the hell is a tethe'alla? And descent of the Aegises - as in, plural?

"Fuck," he says, out loud, with feeling. He stares, for a minute, brain whirring as it tries to process, and absentmindedly tells Asch to go ahead, if he doesn't mind. A hole in his shirt probably doesn't matter, actually, because he already bares so much skin, torso-wise - his neckline starts in Aspio and plunges for Zaphias - but it's a reason for them to linger a moment longer while he tries to just. Get out of his own head.

"Yeah, I - none of that is familiar," he admits, feeling helpless and hating it. "Not the locations, not the year - and fucking. Aegsises? Like, more than one?" He resists the urge to reach up and yank at his hair. Asch would probably slap his hands down before they got far anyway, if he's anything like other healers Yuri's known. "I think you're right when you say I'm a long way from home. Fuck."

"We have four, technically," Asch says, "but two came from whatever the hell the Architect made them out of, and two were made by humans, and it's only the second pair running around actually on the planet now. They're good kids."

He gives Jade a look, over Yuri's head, that says don't say shit. And he pulls a safety pin out of his endless fleet of pockets and pins Yuri's shirt somewhat into place.

If Yuri doesn't fucking know, then telling him can wait until they get the fuck out of here.

"Okay. Two minutes until some asshole sticks their nose in here on patrol, we need to get. Panic party later."

Oh, Jade doesn't like this one bit, but he knows when to keep his mouth shut even without Asch broadcasting it so loudly. This is a can of worms they really can't afford to open right now, which is fine. The longer Jade can forestall the massive headache that is dealing with alternate worlds, the better.

"Explanations will have to wait," Jade agrees, just to head that off. He extends a hand to Yuri. "On your feet, then. Unless you think you still need help walking."

He considers Jade's outstretched hand for a moment, and then considers himself. He feels - achey, but whole. For a patch job, Asch did it thoroughly enough that Yuri doesn't think he needs to worry about the wound for the rest of their escape.

He reaches up to take Jade's hand, and grimacing apologetically, lets the other man take most of his weight as he's pulled to his feet, wincing a little as he refinds his footing. "Explanations can wait," he agrees, even as his mind whirs over four fucking Aegises - Aegisi? - and. Whatever the hell an Architect is, because the way Asch said it, Yuri can't imagine he meant it in the way Yuri's used to it meaning.

"I think I'll be fine walking," he says finally, and grips his wrist - his core - with one hand. "I don't think I'll be up to fighting, though, if it comes down to it." Beyond just being wounded and so recently healed he isn't sure he wants to risk battle just yet...the aer here is...different. It's taken him a while, but he thinks he's finally figured out why.

There's...more of it. More than he's ever felt flow through him in his life. Terca Lumireis is a world that's been surviving on one Aegis and an ever dwindling supply of blades for near on a thousand years. It isn't just that more and more humans are being born dead zones - it's that the land itself is dying. This is a world with an aer supply beyond anything Yuri has ever encountered.

He's honestly scared that if he tries to pull on it, even a little, he'll pull just a little too much, and blow something up. Namely, his arm. He eyes Asch and Jade. "That cool with you two? I'm probably going to be more dead weight than anything."

"It's fine," Asch says. "It wouldn't be the first time, and Jade alone is enough to handle anyone without a blade and most people with. Both of us in resonance is overkill."

The kind of overkill they might have needed if their mystery Aegis attacked them. Which, Asch is very glad he didn't, but it would have been hard to blame him if he had. Strange people in strange places and all.

"I'll lead the way," Asch says, nodding to Jade as he steps out of the cell, before glancing at Yuri. "Do you know sneaking tricks, or do you need me to cover you?" There's no time to teach him right now if he doesn't know. Covering Jade is easy, resonance and all.

(He sends a ping out at Mythra, an 'on the way soon' sort of feeling, just so she doesn't worry too much.)

(Sorry, Mythra. It would have taken them just as long as if Jade had had to carry Yuri, to be fair.)

(Does thinking about Mythra brighten Jade's mood? Oh, considerably. It's almost embarrassing.)

"Overkill might be an understatement, to be quite honest," Jade says, but other than that quip makes himself useful by watching Asch's back and letting the dark blades sort things out. There's no one coming, of course, but better to be ready for the possibility.

Yuri considers Asch's question with a thoughtful frown. "I'm not the best at it," he admits. Knight's blades weren't meant to be sneaky, after all, and it's just not in his personality to sneak, anyway. He can do it, he's just...rusty. "I'll follow your lead?" It comes out as a question, which wasn't what he was intending, but - well. It gets the message across, and he turns to grin at Jade.

"Well, understatement or not, there's no kill like overkill," he quips, and thinks fondly about Patty. "So. We heading out?"

Asch shakes his head slightly. "I can manage one more, it's just a pain for people I'm not in resonance with." The dark ether in the air around them gets palpably thicker in response, folding around Yuri as well. "Probably easier if you stay between us."

And without anything further, he seems to meld into the shadows, just a little bit, before nodding at Jade and turning to lead them the hell out of there.

They have the same amount of trouble leaving the building as they do getting in-- which is to say: none. The shadows provide welcome companions that keep them out of sight, and shield their exit. All that there is to do is pick up Mythra and head somewhere that's slightly less middle-of-nowhere.

Home is too far away to make the trip in a reasonable amount of time, so they settle for an inn at the nearest town, which has precisely one inn to its name. They purchase two rooms at it, rooms that are small but each contain two beds (if little else). They seem to be the inn's only patrons, for better or worse. Less prying eyes. More reasons to pry.

Still, one cannot ask for any better privacy than this, really. Plenty of space to have the inevitable conversation they need to have with Yuri. And no sense putting it off, either. Once they've converged in the same room, Jade perches on the edge of the far bad and considers the blade-- the Aegis-- they rescued.

"Say, Yuri. Seeing how far you are from home, would you mind telling us where, exactly, you consider home?"

Their escape is simple, and thus, most of it is a blur to Yuri. Sometime between exiting the building where he'd been caged and arriving at the inn they've all piled into - alongside a new blade, blonde and bright and feeling like Estelle, just less pink and clingy, he thinks her name is like...Mythra? - he'd just mentally checked out of what the fuck was going on and handed his body over to autopilot. He was sore and exhausted and overwhelmed, and at this point, he's pretty sure he trusts Asch and Jade enough to trust following their lead.

If they were going to kill him, after all, it would have been stupid for them to waste time and energy healing him and getting him out of that cell. They could have just finished off the job Sodia'd started while he was behind bars and with far less mobility.

Upon reaching the inn, and then being guided to the room they're apparently all sharing - not that he's complaining, but there's only two beds - Yuri immediately flops down on the one closest to the door, and thus, closest to him. Hey, he's injured, so sue him - none of the others raise an immediate protest, so he figures it's fine. If one of them needs to crash later they can share, he's slept in worse places. He doesn't care.

Jade's question has him rolling over and eyeing him through the hair that falls in front of his eyes as he resettles on his stomach. "Interesting question," he muses, because the way it's phrased makes him think Jade thinks he isn't just, like, from another country or continent or something - which, yeah, is what their earlier conversation had been leading to, but it's still a wild jump to make. Hell, Yuri himself still isn't quite processing the conclusion he's come to. "There are a few places," he says finally. "Zaphias, Dahngrest - two cities in Terca Lumireis." He watches the others in the room closely. "I'm guessing those names are about as familiar to you as whatever the hell a Tethe'alla was to me?"

Edited 2021-04-08 06:57 (UTC)

"Never heard of them," Asch agrees. He's settled onto the desk chair in the room, with a hairbrush - the braiding thing is Jade and Mythra's personal ritual, but he's not shy about joining in at a distance.

They're still in resonance, mostly in the name of not distressing the weird, possibly extra-dimensional Aegis with the fact that blades no longer need resonance. Limit the number of revelations per day, and this one doesn't need to be pushed yet. Jade and Mythra are about the only resonance that doesn't make Asch want to climb out of his skin.

"But I don't think we'd find anything digging into the historical record, either." Which is phrased in such a way that it's a definite no to Jade and Mythra, aware of his intuition, but not so much to Yuri. Dark blades gonna dark blade.

It's probably something Yuri has noted as unusual that Asch hasn't actually removed any of his skin-covering gear yet - even his hands are still gloved as he works his hair out of its tight bun and brushes it loose around his shoulders. That's definitely noteworthy kinds of weird.

For a big rescue, this whole thing has been pretty anticlimactic. It was more boring than anything - Mythra'd almost been hoping something would go wrong, just to give her a chance to do something rather than just wait around and keep the guards' minds off their prisoner. But the fact that it's a success, and that Jade and Asch are in and out with their Aegis charge (their flesh eater Aegis charge! what the fuck!) so quickly, is enough. There's something to be said for stealth sometimes, she guesses.

Mythra's taken a seat on the bed Yuri's not on, legs tucked under her to make room for Jade. She tugs his hair back over his shoulder, sectioning it out as she decides what to do with it. As she does, she eyes their new friend again. Asch and Jade had caught her up on the way - what there was to be caught up on, which had managed to be nothing she'd expected.

It's better than their original assumption that someone had managed to reverse engineer the Aegis creation process again, though! There is that.

"Definitely a long way from home, then," she says, with a frown, picking up a section of Jade's hair. Something involved, but not elaborate enough to make it uncomfortable, she figures. "Might need some help getting you home."

With Mythra doing his hair, Jade relaxes considerably. Not that he wasn't relaxed before, exactly, because despite the unfortunate surpises today (flesh eater Aegis! from another world!) it went about exactly as planned. So now he just has to deal with, well. Flesh eater Aegis. From another world.

And he must be from another world. Asch said that the locations Yuri mentioned weren't from the past, which leaves precisely one other option. Jade sighs.

"Well, I'm certain Zelos and Colette would be willing to help us if we asked," Jade says, responding first to Mythra. "We might only need one of them, to be honest. Yuri can surely pull his own weight, can't he?" He smiles at Yuri, the smile the one that some might call predatory. "In fact, Yuri, do you remember how you got to this world? If you got here by your own power, that might be easy enough to reverse."

It takes Yuri an honest minute to realise he's being addressed. As adrenalin had settled down, and the other had settled down with it, the air had taken on a distinct domestic edge. Hell, the light blade - Mythra, with her aerlines on full display, shameless and bright and there's a part of him that can't stop staring at her even as a voice that sounds like Estelle's whispers that's rude, Yuri from the far corners of his mind - is currently braiding Jade's hair. She's clearly completely unconcerned about the events of the night. At least, she's not concerned enough to be actively stressing about it.

Maybe it's a light blade thing. That alignment is pretty rare, so Yuri doesn't know many light blades - just Estelle and Patty, and Patty might not count, considering her special circumstances. It's not like a light blade is the only thing she is. Estelle, though, is pure light to the core, and takes to weird situations the way Mythra seems to be doing.

It makes him homesick, a little, to be honest. He pulls his gaze away from Mythra and pretends to himself that it's just because he doesn't want to make her uncomfortable by staring at her glowing lines of green for too long.

He turns his attention to Jade, and turns the names Zelos and Colette over in his mind. They can help, Jade implies, and Yuri figures that means they're probably the Aegises that had been brought up earlier, since apparently this world has two of them. He can't imagine who else could possibly have the power to deal with dimensional travel, though from the Are You For Real? vibes he'd felt coming off of Mythra, maybe they do deal with this sort of thing more often than he'd think, and Zelos and Colette are some sort of big names in the field. Aegis feels about right, though, the surety settling in deep against his core -

- and then Jade says Yuri can surely pull his own weight, can't he? and Yuri has to push himself up to side eye the other blade, because where and when the hell had he ever given off the vibe that he knew anything about dimensional travel?

He stares at Jade like he's got a questionable grip on reality. "I got stabbed off of a tower," he says bluntly. "Last thing I remember is hitting water. And no, I definitely did not come here under my own power - how could I? Is that just a thing ordinary blades can do here? Hop, skip and jump into different worlds?" It would explain why they seem familiar with it, he supposes...

Edited 2021-04-09 08:22 (UTC)

"... Putting aside the ordinary blades question for a minute..."

Asch closes his eyes, going still and inhaling (ice, the truth he lacks, but run a hand of gentleness over it, put the compassion that Jade lacks in turn into it).

"Right. Let me put it like this: At least here, natural, normal blades only have core crystals in one shape." He nods his head in Mythra and Jade's direction as an indication - for all that Mythra isn't actually a natural blade, she imitates them far more closely than Asch himself in every regard. "They're roughly square, or diamond-shaped, depending on what axis of the crystal the blade manifests around."

He turns back to Yuri, and his gaze goes a little sharp, on the unusual shape of the core crystal on the new arrival's wrist. "A core crystal like that, I've only ever seen on two kinds of blades - Aegises, and failed imitations of the Aegises."

Yuri's not exactly the most booksmart guy, for all the lessons he'd been forced to sit through with the knights. He's never really needed those smarts, before, because his intuition, his gut instincts, had just been that strong, and had rarely led him astray.

And right now, that intuition isn't telling him that Asch is wrong.

Something like vertigo, something like a pow hammer to the back of the head.

It's easy to say, our worlds are clearly different, because they are - Yuri knows plenty of blades with all kinds of core shapes. Hell, Patty doesn't even have a visible core; wherever hers is, it's somewhere internal, like how humans have organs, and thus he has absolutely no idea what shape hers takes. So. It's easy to think that.

It's less easy to say it aloud, with confidence, when, echoing Asch's firm yet gentle only Aegises comes the whisper of the only blade you know with a core identical to yours is Estelle.

He's always know his core was a little unusual. Bigger than most blades, and in a fucking weird place; cores settle somewhere on the torso, usually, sometime the head or neck - limbs can get cut off and then poof! You're compressed back to your core, you lose all your memories.

Maybe, he thinks, a core's placement matters less when you'll remember anyway.

Because the Aegis - an Aegis? - doesn't forget.

He swallows, feeling nervous, and. God, he hates how much sense his brain is telling him this makes, all the pieces coming together to form a complete picture, because no it doesn't.

"I'm - not an Aegis," he says, but even he can hear how fucking unsure he sounds. "Isn't that something I'd know? I've never done anything...Aegis-y. And if there was more than one Aegis, isn't that the sort of thing people would know? There'd be - I don't know, historical records." He grips his wrist, and stares down at his core - a glossy cut of onyx, with a red star bleeding out from the center, like a burning eye. "Besides," he says. "I'm a flesh eater. You wouldn't think - what would even be the point of making an Aegis into a flesh eater?"

He's rambling now - how the hell would they have any idea how to answer his questions? - but hey, he can't help it, he's panicking.

He's all alone on this bed, and no one in this room has...done anything to him, but still, in that moment, he's finding it really hard not to feel cornered.

~~You want to run.~~

Yuri... really doesn't know, does he? It surprises Jade - and he appreciates Asch stepping up to take the explanation, because Jade knows he would have had a hard time being kind, himself.

Yuri stammers about how he couldn't possibly be an Aegis, he couldn't possibly be without knowing, without someone else knowing. The flesh eater thing in particular pings as curious to Jade - those are not the words of a man who committed the act himself, not on his own terms.

"I suppose if they had no idea the blade they were making into a flesh eater was an Aegis," Jade suggests, though he does wonder how anyone could feel Yuri's ether signature and not know. Humans, he supposes. "And - I don't know how young you are, Yuri, but blades generally don't make the history books within the first few decades of their lives. And if this is your first lifetime - and it must be, right? If you remembered others, you would know you were an Aegis. Regardless, how could anyone write about a blade who has been asleep for most of the history they're writing?"

His eyes flick towards Asch, subtly enough that Yuri might miss it, considering it's not like Jade can move his head much without interrupting Mythra.

(He processes how distressed Yuri really is about here, and hopes he hasn't been too cold, too harsh - wishes he'd thought to try and borrow some of Asch's compassion before he dove in.)

Asch, for his part, takes a deep breath, and then another. Jade and Mythra, in the emotional bleed with him, will probably recognize the spike of feeling, of emotion like there's scum on the walls on the inside of his head - but this is a bit he hasn't told then, hasn't told anyone, because if he's honest with himself, Luke is the reason he did it, and Mithos just got lucky with a side effect of it.

"My first driver," he says, voice too crystalline to be anything but the truth, too close to shattering, "wanted to make our Aegises into flesh eaters, so that blades would never have to rely on human drivers again."

He stops again, takes a deep breath, and leaves it there, for everyone else to process for a little while. Instead he says, "I'm probably the person most familiar with flesh eater medical treatment in the world right now, if you want me to take a better look at that wound and your health in general."

Yuri's a feeler, not a thinker - most of the time, at least. And right now, what he's feeling is distinctly overwhelmed. So much so, it feels like he's thinking too much - like his brain is screaming at him.

He fights back the urge to cry or scream or - well, anything, really, that seems childish and stupid but would, he thinks, in the moment, really make him feel at least a little better. Maybe he'll be able to find a nice river to yell into later. Right now, with the outward ease that comes with a lot of practice, he drags himself back together with brute force. Poke at the problems later, when you have time and allies you can trust to watch your back against anything.

In the now, focus on what's in front of you. And what's in front of him is Asch, looking almost as on edge as Yuri feels, offering him a boon.

Frankly, Yuri does not want Asch to take a look at him. In the cell had been one thing - he'd been actively bleeding out, if just a little - but he's hit a mental limit and his skin is crawling and numb at the same time. Just being in the same room as all these people is enough to make his annoying heart beat faster. But he also sees the offer for what it truly is: concern, a gentle change of subject, and, knowing healers, Not Actually An Offer.

Not that he thinks Asch would just walk over his consent if he actually said no, but. He'd probably act like Yuri was being an idiot about it.

He very carefully avoids thinking about...the Aegis stuff. Only so many world shattering revelations at a time, and if he has to pick one to focus on, it's going to be the universe jumping. Healthy? Probably not!

"Blade studies in general aren't a big thing in Terca Lumireis," Yuri says eventually, tone even. "Flesh eater studies...well. I'd probably have to get into the history and politics of my world for context to even explain the complexities of why flesh eater studies either don't exist or are super under the table...?" He trails off with that, leaving the question open. It's not like he knows fuck all about how flesh eating works here, socially speaking, though the fact that only Jade in the room is also a flesh eater...honestly says a lot, from his point of view. "All that to say that. yeah, if you want to throw your expertise this way, you can." He shrugs, trying to play it off a little.

"I think we can get the picture," Jade answers to Yuri's open question. "When Asch says he's the lead authority in flesh eater medicine right now, he means it, by nature of there simply being no one else. Most of the research has been lost, burned, obfuscated... We have personal observations, and not much else."

Jade shrugs, here, a smile to take the edge off the mood.

"Such is our lot, I suppose."

"Hey, some of us remember mysterious reports that came into our hands under questionable circumstances almost word for fucking word." It's teasing, because Jade knows that and Asch knows Jade knows that and so on up to several layers of abstraction, because he reproduced said report several months ago for Jade to read over.

The first thing Yuri gets, though, is a core crystal ping - not the resonancing type, but a diagnostic sort from a healing blade who has worked with other blades enough to know what to look for. Give him your ether outputs and your sync rates, buddy.

"You made the mistake of wandering around with an open shirt anyway, so you get to lean back instead of forward," Asch says, keeping his hands very much where Yuri can see them. Putting down his hair brush and getting up provides plenty of warning long before he's going to have to touch the other blade's chest. "Has anyone ever actually checked your pulse before?"

"Hey, don't knock the shirt," Yuri says, reclining back. He watches Asch's every move carefully, but he's really got nothing to be worried about. The touching still isn't comfortable, but it's professional, impersonal. He doesn't linger. "It's a fashion statement." And, unlike some other poor bastards he's known over the years, he managed to keep the general blade ambivalence to temperatures and illnesses. He may as well embrace that.

Asch's ping against his core is - weird, actually! It's just as impersonal and professional as the rest of his check over, which is a little ??? to Yuri when it comes to, you know, sliding up against his aer to get a real good look at it. Estelle's checked him like this, sometimes, but once they were in resonance. He resists the urge to blush and slap Asch's metaphysical touch away from his core. This must be something that's...maybe not common, here, but common enough that it's not something to freak out about; another aspect to the upkeep of blade health that comes about in a world not actively trying to no mercy run them.

He tilts his head as he considers Asch's question. "I don't think so?" He says. Flynn had, once, but that was before he'd had one - on one of their first missions gone badly, when Flynn had slipped into shock and autopiloted his way through some basic first aid before they'd both gone wait, Yuri, you're a blade. "Is that something that we should have been doing?" Oops, if so.

"I'm no expert, but I've been hassled by enough healers to know that generally, yes. Unless death by unexpected heart failure is prefered way to go...?"

Maybe he shouldn't be joking about this. Well, that isn't going to stop him.

Asch just sighs. "Yes, that's generally the baseline of things any being with a living heart should be doing."

Honestly. That said, the number of flesh eaters he knows who take care of their bodies effectively is really only like two: Malik, and Jade (bullied into doing it by Malik).

Thankfully, Yuri does give him the data, and... Wow, okay, that's sure a thing. "Point in the Aegis column," he says, "you're offputting slightly more ether than Jade is with a shitty synchronization rate." Jade was a powerful blade with an appallingly well-synced driver, but it's all ice; Yuri's output is much better balanced - another sign of an Aegis - so it's not as obvious until actually crunching the numbers, but there it is.

The next words are more of a statement than a question, a foregone conclusion that Asch is just seeking confirmation on. "That wasn't your own driver's heart, was it." It might have been a driver's, it's not ether-dead the way someone who hasn't been exposed to blades might be (flesh eaters are changed by the organs they put in, but the organs themselves don't change much), but it sure has hell isn't in a 'natural' resonance loop.

Edited 2021-04-19 22:09 (UTC)

That wasn't your own drivers heart, was it.

It's not panic that freezes Yuri in that moment, but it's the closest word for the feeling he's got. He teeters on the edge, caught between attack! and flee! and the only thing that keeps Asch from getting a fist to the face is that he finally settles on the middle ground of getting everyone the fuck away from him - he shoves Asch a little as he scrambles back, but it's without malice or even intent, really - and once he's got a little more personal space to breathe in once more, the urge to call on his sword and start swinging has lessened. A little.

It's not Asch's fault he just stepped right onto Yuri's one, singular, I Cannot Touch This line of thought. He couldn't have known. He repeats this in his head, over and over, like a mantra. It doesn't really calm him as much as he would like, and in that moment he feels a flash of petty, visceral hate for Asch.

Then, he just feels tired. He's so, so tired.

"No," he says. "It's not my driver's heart. How - how could you tell?" Could he tell more? Flynn's voice echoes in his mind, words that have haunted him for three years without end.

Was it Hisca?

"Like..." he trails off. He knows fuck all about human biology. "Can you tell the..." not gender, probably. Hearts don't differ depending on that. He thinks. "The age of it?"

The grab and shove isn't that unexpected, the moment Yuri's panic hikes and oh yeah he stepped in it with that one.

"Not without equipment I sure as hell don't have here." Could he tell? Yeah, probably, intuition would scream it at him if nothing else, but Yuri is close enough to breaking down already. Whatever the hell the circumstance was, it clearly wasn't a good one. (Not that any flesh eater's circumstance was good, but there's a different between being Malik-level fucked up when it comes up, and being Kratos-level fucked up. This is more on the Kratos end.)

Asch regulates his breathing carefully, hoping that projecting calm as much as he can manage will help Yuri keep hold on whatever he's holding onto.

"All blades have a synchronization rate," he says instead, explaining slowly. "Usually it's with their drivers, but for flesh eaters it's with their human organs. If it's their driver's, it's significantly better than if it's someone else's." He's not avoiding the word 'heart' out of strict respect for whatever about the question set Yuri off. Hearts are just the most common. "Most of the time, it also means they'll have less nasty side effects. Your synchronization rate? One of the worst I've ever seen." Genis' is probably worse, because his heart is actively killing him, but Asch hasn't done anything more than hear about the roaming flesh eater in passing.

Jade pockets the information, as he always does, teasing theories out of Yuri's words, worries about the heart. He doesn't even know whose it was, does he? Which solidifies Jade's earlier observation that Yuri was likely caught up in some sort of experimentation. He keeps his mouth shut - not sure what his theorizing would do to help Yuri calm, especially since Yuri looks about ready to bolt, still.

"I suppose that's another point in the Aegis column," Jade muses. "Your health being as well as it is, considering." No sense repeating what Asch just said.

Perhaps he should have let the Aegis thing lie until Yuri was more calm... or perhaps it'll get Yuri on a still-bad-but-less-triggering track. One can hope.

Yuri sees Jade's gentle attempt to - well, not outright change the subject, more steer it onto a somewhat adjacent track - for what it is and. Well. He'd rather not be talking about this at all, but he's having difficulty articulating that through the hummingbird panic thrumming through him, so he'll take it and be grateful.

"Maybe I'm just an outlier," he says, trying for humorous. His ears are ringing, a bit, for no physical reason, so he isn't actually sure how far it falls flat because he's trying to reorient his brain into actually being functional. "Above the curve, so to speak."

Okay, that was a terrible joke.

He turns to Asch and sends him a weak smile. "Sorry," he says. He isn't sure if he's apologising for the grab, for asking for more details in the first place, or both. It's up to Asch to decide how he takes it, he guesses. "That's just...a bit of a sore topic for me. You've probably already figured it out by now, but...I didn't exactly become a flesh eater willingly. And no, it wasn't my driver. He's fine."

He shakes his head, then looks at Jade. Another point in the Aegis column, huh? His next question he addresses to the room:

"Say I am an Aegis," he says. "Like. What's the next move, past presumably getting out of here?" Yuri's not usually a plan guy. But hey, sometimes you need a little bit of stability in your life.

Yuri feels like he needs to cash in a few decades worth, right now.

"You wouldn't be the first," Asch says. "Contrary to the reputations they have in our world, and I'm guessing yours as well - most of the flesh eaters I've known are like that. Blades who actually kill their own drivers are an incredible rarity; even blades who take hearts from drivers who are already dying aren't that common."

So, no, he's not angry about the grab or anything. He's not even really surprised. (Realistically, Yuri's holding it together better than Kratos would in the same shoes.)

As for the question... "I don't have any genius ideas right now," Asch says. "Other than maybe dragging Mithos out of the network to get his opinion. In theory we could do that anywhere, but since you're not a part of our network..."

They might actually have to go to the Goddamn Tower And All Its Fun Shit for Yuri to talk to Mithos.

"...Either way, we should keep moving for a while. The people who captured you won't give up that easily, if they managed to figure out what they had."

"Honestly, even though we're the same network as him, I'm not sure how easily we'd be able to get his attention, either. If you aren't one of his siblings..." Jade trails off, sighs. It's more exasperated than anything else, said with a smile. But then, he rarely doesn't smile.

"Asch is right, though. I'd say we should take some time to rest, seeing as we paid for these beds, but we'll leave first thing in the morning? Maybe even sooner, if we want to use the cover of night to get further unnoticed." They have two dark blades. Might as well use them.

Leaving under the cover of darkness sounds more Yuri's speed, to be honest, but something else they never tell you about flesh eating until you've got a heart already beating in your chest: you're going to be a lot more tired than you would be otherwise. You're going to actually need to sleep.

And right now, after everything he's been through recently, the stabbing and the world travel -- Yuri's body is begging him to just crash for a solid twelve hours. He knows he probably won't be able to give it that much rest, but maybe he could meet it halfway and give it at least six.

He...doesn't really want to get into it right now, because at Asch's statement a very loud Actually Most Flesh Eaters I Know Did In Fact Kill Their Drivers piped up in the back of his head -- Yuri, forced into what he is against his will and with a heart not his driver's is, in fact, a wild anomaly in his society -- but he shuts it up because it's late and this isn't his world. This isn't his place to speak.

(He does wonder what it's like, though, to live in a world where flesh eaters are rare, where they're mostly unknown -- are humans just better in this world? No, that can't be it.)

"I guess we'll head out in the morning, then?" He says, to the room at large. "Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm beat. I need to make like log for at least a few hours." The bed he sits on is all but singing to him...

SOUP SOUP SOUP

waiter there's some gravy in my soup

i'm afraid the gravy is terminal

terminal like a bus station, it lets you go anywhere

well i would like to take it anywhere but here please

unfortuantely that may be a bit difficult

they're working on it

double the tips if they work on it faster

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(yuri voice) oh we title dropping? hi i'm yuri the oblivious, trademark pending

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shows up two days late with starbucks

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(or a can of soup, if you will,)

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swing and a soup

did someone say soup

me me me

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yuri are u ready to have an emotionally bad time

even if he's not i am!

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trauma time :D (again)

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