Backdated Adventures

[photophobic]

For various prompts belonging to different points on this Fractured World prequel timeline! If you'd like one, hit me up on plurk starktech or on Discord - cryloren#2195. Warnings in subject headers where appropriate. Kylo is generally unsafe for work.

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[photophobic]

"Except when they're visiting you."

Kylo would likely be more annoyed at the non-answer had it not been prefaced by that strangely satisfying demonstration of something rarer than simple obedience. It isn't often that people listen to his advice, consider and then choose to follow it.

Admittedly the crushing weight of fatigue hanging over him probably had more of a role than anything else. Kylo's rarely encountered such miserable exhaustion even among prisoners deliberately deprived of sleep for the purposes of interrogation, but he sees no devices or instruments nearby. The boy's bed is warm and soft, bathed only in the gentlest moonlight.

He glances back up the ladder to the mouth of the dungeon.

"You can't control it," he murmurs, attention swinging back to the boy's face. "Can you. What is it? Shape-shifting?"

[nightmarist]

"Something like that."

The boy also glances upward, considering the path to escape right in front of him yet making no attempt to even inch toward it. Instead, he rearranges the blanket so it's a bit less twisted around his limbs.

"If you could hear me from all the way outside, shouldn't you already know what it is?"

[photophobic]

Kylo fixes the boy with a particularly flat stare.

"If you heard someone screaming. All the way outside. Would you know what was happening?"

[nightmarist]

"Usually," the boy says, "they bring me something to help. But sometimes, if I get too calm, they won't get the results they want. So they leave me like this. They know I won't be able to hold it off forever."

None of that is precisely an answer, though the boy seems to think it might be. Everything's out of focus for him, cognitively. He's tipping to one side and hasn't noticed yet, despite the increasing likelihood he's going to topple off the edge of the bed.

[photophobic]

"We all sleep eventually," Kylo murmurs.

He thinks of the condemned in their cells across the courtyard, curled in on themselves and oblivious to the passing of time. Safe if only for now, hidden away in an untouchable world that exists only for them. Fear is a strange paralytic, in the end.

The boy is drifting in front of his eyes.

Why, he couldn't explain if asked. Perhaps it's because he feels like he's wandered into a liminal space where actions don't necessarily have consequence. Perhaps it's that part of him believes he must be imagining all of this— the secret chamber with the secret prisoner, the terror in the night that only he can hear. But he reaches out a hand and a thought, and the air the boy is about to tumble through becomes an emptiness his exhausted body can lean on.

"Even me."