[PRP] You've got mail (Oliver & Elliot)

[Melancholies]

The meeting had concluded, everthing had returned to relative normalcy, the predictable routines and the same-face stuff. Oliver went to class, he went to work. Renard's tutoring was new, but not unwelcome, so it fit in seamlessly with his schedule. If it wasn't for the full moon hanging high in the sky, it'd be a perfect evening.

And then the second letters came.

And while this wouldn't be such an issue (because, like any routine, magic was falling into a predictable situation and he just wasn't surprised), it became one when he had received not one letter, but two. This was because the second was addressed to Elliot, his definitely not magical roommate.

So, there was either a genuine mix-up here, or s**t was about to get really real.

"Elliot...?" There was other mail bundled in Oliver's arms as he came back inside, but he was hardly paying attention to any of it.

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

Back by the balcony door, Eli was still in his pjs from the night before—the ones with Australian shepherds and frisbees all over because 'it looks like Pascal, I have to buy them!' When he heard his name, he turned smoothly on his heel. There was a small splash of sunlight across his face.

"Hm? What is it, Oliver?" he asked, shuffling over in a way that said he wasn't in a hurry, it was a lazy day. "Mail for me?"

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

Oliver didn't hand the letter over. Both were opened, both were the same, both were summons, and his knuckles were white as he gripped them, the seams of the envelopes messy where he'd gracelessly shredded them open with his claws.

"Mail for you." He said somewhat stiffly. For a second it looked like he was about to relinquish the letter, but then he thought better of it. "You're magic." It would either be responded with 'oh what, really honey?' or 'oh right about that.' One of his ears flicked in preemptive agitation.

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

First Horace, now Oliver. The look on Elliot's face shifted from relaxed and vaguely sleepy to unsure in a matter of seconds. It was just too bad that Ollie didn't give him a little more credit. The answer would be sincere, at least. "I... am," he said, the hesitation obvious in his voice. "I meant to tell you, I did, I just... I only found recently. I'm not even sure how to handle this." Then he seemed to realize something, his brows furrowing and his lips darkly creasing the corners of his mouth.

He'd been working himself up about all this to the point where he couldn't even think totally rationally when directly confronted.

"But I don't understand... how did you know?" It's not like they were in Other Ashdown. That had been Horace's clue, the only one, but almost indisputable. Oliver had no clues, or so he thought.

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"Do you remember that meeting I told you about?" His brow furrowed, "I got another letter. A follow up. It's from a fetch. They're othercreatures."

Oliver was staring.

"You got one too."

His gaze fell after that, one hundred miles per hour, smack dab into the ground. If sight could cause tremors, the entire world would be shaking. "I don't think they'd send a message like this to someone who wasn't magic..." He sighed audibly, body posture way too tense. Finally he held the letter out for Elliot to read.

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

"I... recall you mentioning," he muttered, taking the letter between both hands. None of it made much sense, not even after he read it twice. "So now that I'm magic... whoever this fetch fellow Odal is, he wants me to help you all destroy and recreate the charter?"

Something was squeezing around Elliot's heart, a feeling he was usually able to tamp down quite well. With as tense as Oliver was and as much as his own doubt was permiating the atmosphere around them, though, it was difficult to ignore it.

"What is the charter?" he asked, "I don't really understand what any of this means." Nor could he understand the full implications of what he'd apparently gotten himself into.

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"It's a piece of paper or something. Apparently a bunch of people in a past life thought it'd be a great idea to bind their souls to this charter thing and it ended up making people like me." He looked up, "Moonwalkers, there's wargs with animal familiars, there's nobles like my brother..."

Oliver relaxed for a second, but only to lean against the wall—slump—his tail knocking into the wall too, though it was mostly cushioned by the jacket at his waist that hid it. "You probably got one just because you're magical. Every other magical person probably got a letter too, even if they weren't at the party. Not that I'd know how they'd know, but—" But well, magic.

"I have too much going on with school and work." Oliver pushed himself away from the wall again, "Shiloh's got his fingers all up in this bullshit, so I'm sure with him around it'll be just fine." Wow Ollie, were you a little salty? "All the other people and their stupid gung-ho approach to magic or whatever the hell, they can handle this."

He'd already had his consent ripped away from him.

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

"A piece of paper has that kind of power? So then... why are you destroying it?" Honestly, Elliot never wanted this to turn into twenty questions. It was just a natural progression of 'I don't know jack s**t, so this is all I can do: ask questions.' The fact that Oliver already read as ticked off didn't really help the situation, though.

He crossed his arms, a defense mechanism.

"So you're not going to help?" It wasn't an accusation or anything. Even if Eli didn't fully understand the situation, he wouldn't blame anyone for having their own agendas. Especially if getting involved could be dangerous. Still...

"Although," he shouldn't say it, he really shouldn't, "it sounds more like you're upset with Shiloh than unwilling to help."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"'Cause everyone else wants to destroy it." Oliver, in fact, had also voted to destroy it, but Elliot didn't know that. "'Cause the Court is apparently an abusive piece of s**t that ruined my brother and a bunch of other people so they wanna burn it to the ground. 'Cause it's apparently embedded in the back of some girl and it's killing her. I get it, fine, wreck the thing."

His fingers were thumbing over the corner of his letter involuntarily. "I've already done my part to help." His voice was dark, quiet, "Shiloh cares more about that Otherworld bullshit. He never told me about anything in the first place, so he obviously never needed my help in the first place. I'm just the twin who gets to transform into a raccoon once a month."

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

It was strange in that weird, alien sort of way; he felt like this whenever his and Oliver's stories didn't match. As long as he'd known them, Eli always thought Shiloh was relatively open about the status of his magic. There were things he hid, things he didn't tell Eli, but that was alright because he knew Shiloh was simply keeping him unburdened from things he had no way to help with. The twins, though... he was under the assumption their relationship had always been closer than that, more open.

Had he been wrong? Even so...

"I'm sure he... didn't mean it maliciously," he told Ollie, his voice so much smaller than it usually was. "He's stubborn, you know that. He probably thought he was protecting you."

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"Protecting me, yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what it was." Despite how malicious his voice sounded, it wasn't sarcastic. Bitter, sure, but he said it with enough conviction that it was obvious he believed it. "'Cause he knows what he's doing, and he's with all these other people that know what they're doing. He knows I'd just get in the way. I need to be protected, just like how he always protected me from Dad, it's like he doesn't think I'm capable of anything."

He laughed, but it wasn't light or happy or amused sounding. It was angry. "And that's why I don't want to stick my nose into it. I barely knew what I was doing when we remade the sigil, and look at what happened!" He made a grand motion to the entire apartment, "Christ, they all barely knew what they were doing too, but they sure acted like it. It's not my problem. It's nothing I want to be involved in."

His thumb burned with phantom pains, even more intrusive due to his sensitive hands. Him and everyone else on that charter had apparently already done way too much damage. People could let themselves get consumed with their guilt to do something about it, but Oliver Beaumont wasn't the one who signed that piece of paper, not this one. He wasn't responsible for the actions of a look-alike. Maybe he was a dumb b*****d. Maybe he still was; but they were still different strains of <******** moronic.

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

It had been, what, years since Elliot had seen Oliver this legitimately angry? Something like that. They had tiffs, the two of them, the twins, but that was normal. That was life. This... this was something deep and even if he couldn't wrap his head around the true why, Elliot could at least tell that something was very, very wrong.

"What do you mean 'look what happened?'" he asked, mirroring the gesture towards the apartment on a smaller scale. "What does any of this have to do with Shiloh?"

Eli didn't want to start a fight, it's not what he was going for even now. All he wanted to know was why this was happening, why Oliver was so angry, why things had changed the way they did.

"You're angry with Shiloh for keeping secrets, for believing you can't handle every bit of anything he can, but it feels like you've been doing the same thing. Am I wrong?"

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"I mean, look what happened," And then he balked, "Like you have any room to talk! You can't just say that s**t! You don't—you don't know us." He was breathing a little hard, obviously worked up, obviously upset, so obviously upset. "Fine, you wanna know?" His eyes were dark, "You really wanna know what happened in November? Five days before my ******** birthday?"

"Shiloh was keeping all this bullshit about Court away from me. He was keeping away the fact he was kidnapped for months to some hellhole in the Otherworld where some crazy b***h beat the s**t out of him every day. That's nothing compared to everything else, Elliot." He made a wide motion with his hands, "It's the day after Halloween, it's still dark, and you wake up and your head is pounding, and you think hey, that's normal, I have migraines all the time."

He was frowning so hard.

"Except you're outside, and then you're outside of town, and then you're in the woods, and then there's this crazy psychotic women standing in front of this massive abyss into hell, and she's like 'come on in!' and you're like '******** that', except there's your goddamn twin and his stupid boyfriend jumping in like it's a great idea. Hell, everyone's there. They're all jumping in. The world's ending, Eli, the world is <******** ending, and this b***h—you jump in—what else can you do, right?"

"And you're in this void, and you're falling, and there's no sound, and suddenly you're in a gigantic library. This other women is telling you to repair the veil, and that's just what we did. There's this sigil and it fell apart and the world fell apart 'cause the people keeping it together died. Make a new sigil they said, we have to fix the world they said, put your blood into the sigil they said."

"Well, we ******** did, and that's how we ended up here. I'm not your Oliver, and you're not my Eli, because I'm from another ******** world from another ******** place in another ******** time, probably." He finally breathed. "How's that? Great conversation, right? Super easy to bring up? I hardly know you."

saedusk

 

[saedusk]

The shouting was a buzz in his ears, a static. Elliot was listening, of course, he heard every word, but he hated the way the tone made his insides pinch and coil like a dying snake.

There were multiple times, not two or three but many, where he wanted to shout right back. Everything in him wanted to refute Oliver's words, to call them too fantastical and impossibly unreal. All he'd wanted was answers, but the response he got made sense because it made absolutely no sense at all.

"You're not..." he muttered, but the words died in his throat. That's why their stories didn't match. Important, easy, obvious things were different—the way they'd gotten their animals, how long they'd lived in Ashdown. It was the very same reason he'd picked Oliver up in front of their old apartment one morning months ago. The very same reason the bright, loving man he wanted to hold kept pushing him away like they were strangers.

He felt like an idiot for failing to realize.

"How could something like this happen...?" he asked. His heart wrenched itself back and forth in wanting to comfort and care for this Oliver and in wanting to know just what happened to the Oliver he'd known. Wrapping his head around this was a lot more like bashing it into a wall instead.

Melancholies

 

[Melancholies]

"Because magic is a b***h." Oliver said, the fire starting to die from his eyes and his demeanor. Now his eyes were blue and icy and cold, the hairs on his arms stiff with goosebumps and his face washed white like a ghost, like he'd drowned, like he was an unwelcome haunting happening right now in Elliot Labelle's house. He'd felt like a stranger here from day one. "Pascal noticed." His voice was dying down to coals and embers and cinders. Even his thumb felt frostbitten and numb with a different kind of burn. "The cats noticed too."

And for a while after that he was silent, the air hardening in his lungs, his shoulders and his ankles slowly dragging down with lead weights as he dug his own tomb.

"I'm not him." He said again, "I'm not, and you're not the Elliot Labelle I knew either." He wasn't shouting, now he just sounded defeated and weak. "I walked out of the void sometime in December, even though it was just the first of November and we'd only spent four days down there." A chill ran down his spine, "I walked back to our house, except you weren't there, because we didn't live there anymore. Because you'd given up so many creature comforts to be alone with someone who looked like me." And wasn't me, isn't me, would never be me.

"Was it the same, in this world?" He looked lost now, "Did you decide to say ******** it and run away from California with some idiot you hardly knew? Did you have a good time? Or did you two have something more?" Pain, "If you did, then I'm sorry. He's gone and we took that away from you."

He took a deep breath. "I need to go."

saedusk