Prose RP Log ~ Eike
Eike finally gains admittance to the infirmary and visits Cecile for the first time since the attack. Cecile entrusts him with a secret, and the librarian swears to keep it against his better judgment.
Eike entered the infirmary, perpetually glum in his own, however, more so at the notion that a certain few he shared those rare fond memories with, was amongst the suffering. He remarked internally a notion marred with hatred at his own feelings of incapability, needing only a moments glance to see the horrific wounds upon young Cecile's once near perfect self. Truth be known, he would sometimes consider her with the fondness that a parent would, although it never showed, nor would ever show, upon his person.
"My my...how far we've come..." he muttered, sitting at her bedside, morosity intensifying.
Lying in the infirmary bed, Cecile looked almost peaceful, the only sign of injury reflected through the bandage on her face covering the healing welt and her pale skin. After the fiasco in the infirmary the night before that caused her to black out in pain when her medicine wore off, she had not woken up since.
Eike regarded her hesitantly, not wanting to look upon her. Nobody had the knowledge of it, him being such a sordid, secretive figure in the castle household, but he had in his past, lost many. He was a man perpetually marred by so much loss and sorrow that it permanently marred him on the inside, and on his exterior. Long ago, he had lost the ability to express much feeling to anyone at all, some would call his frigidity, a coping mechanism. If they only knew.
"...she is...like death..." he talked to himself, careful not to raise his voice above that of a morose whisper. He simply stared, a stone before her. He knew the pallid tone she had taken was mostly due to bloodloss.
Indeed, there seemed to be less life in her visage today than the night before. The fight in the infirmary did not cause her any bodily harm, but certainly destroyed something within her emotionally. It was most likely that the combination of her belated painkiller dose and the emotional stress was preventing her from waking up. He felt a familiar sickness well up within him. It had been felt several years prior in excess, during the rise of the Flame Champion, like a drug he had grown an ungodly tolerance to its presence in his system, acknowledging it and ignoring it at once. He had seen over the deaths of nearly three hundred people he had known in his entire life span, and cared not to see another. It was curious, how after each, he had entertained the notion of suicide and how it would be a merciful end to an endless torture.
He had long since concluded after the last entertainment of the notion, that it may in fact, cause more torture. Cecile had actually been a player in ending the notion in his mind once and for all, and she nor anyone else had any idea at all that he had wanted to die at any point in time. That was over ten years ago.
"...You're sick...you're strong though...much stronger than many..." he thought, placing his hands on his own lap. "I am confident..." he spoke aloud, and then paused, not ending his sentence in that familiar way he chose to speak.
As if hearing his voice, the petite girl opened her eyes slowly, then looked over to Eike. Her gaze was unfocused and unsteady, but there was a glimmering look of quiet curiosity hiding behind her eyes. For a moment, Eike was confounded, then shocked, and finally embarrassed and chided himself silently about how he had accidentally awakened Cecile surely, and how it would delay her progress at healing definitely. The only notion that anything at all was being processed behind his eyes, was the slight raising of his perpetually furrowed brow.
"...Oh no...you're awake. I'm sorry...it was unintentional..." he spoke, in a quiet voice. Eike's voice matched his appearance, sounding like some rending dirge, perhaps even, a deep and mournful requiem. It could be both piercingly fearful in its bane, and relaxing as the promise of an eternal sleep.
The only response from Cecile was a small smile, with both her eyes and her mouth--one of the first she gave since being admitted to the infirmary. The girl has always been obscenely chipper in any given situation, Eike puzzled about it endlessly over the years, confused at how anybody could be that chipper. A conclusion was never met. He summed it up to a misunderstanding of her functions altogether, he could never really be that profoundly happy.
"...I'm deeply concerned..." he paused and failed to finish the sentence. Was that kindness and caring really there inside him? Again, the thought was cut short by a roadblock. At the moment, he couldn't discern. Fear and anger are the same emotion--as is love and sorrow. Preoccupation with the matter aside, all feelings were noted but jumbled together as if his temporal lobe were a messy file cabinet.
Cecile simply watched him with her far away look, as if trying to discern where they were and what was going on. Only her eyes had moved, and they remained focused on the brooding man's face.
He was perceptive. He lived by the unbridled fact that the vast majority of linguistics where based around bodily movements. It was the simplest of languages, it was the very first form of language, everyone had a general understanding of it, not all were as enveloped by it as eike was. He had been a master of body language for eons.
"...oh...you're in the infirmary. Can you tell...?" He said, unconsciously throwing a deadpan gaze to her.
Her mouth slowly moved into a firm line, as if remembering what had happened the night before. "But... you're here too..." she murmured.
He resisted the urge to point out the obvious, sarcasm wasn't his cup of tea. "...Yes, I'm here..." Eike said. "But there are also others..."
"Ah..." She seemed a little more awake now than earlier, her expression hard to read. "I can't stay here..."
Ever the fervent one. He knew inside that Cecile would try to fulfill her duties while injured. She was perhaps, too fervent. Her perpetual cheer was as condemning as his stony disposition. Their character afflictions were both plagues in their own way.
"You can't...you know how close you came...right?" The sentence was spoken at the same time his vivid imagination of the melee took root for what was only a split second, but it was enough. He broke his gaze and began to look at a more inorganic object in the room. It was an action that to the knowledgeable psychiatrist, was a painfully blatant indicator of seeking solace in isolation. To put it simply, he began his ritual of hiding what was within him at the moment. A profound sadness coupled with a screaming, unanswered one word question. Why.
"Where did I go to...?" She looked at him blankly, an almost dreamlike haze reclaiming her expression thanks to the painkillers.
Another puzzle. He had a very small knowledge of exactly what had happened and where.
"I'm afraid...that I'm in the dark as much as you are...I was one of the last people to find out..." he took on a shaded look, making him look a good thirty more years old. The stress of not knowing about anything at all spurred him to further research the matter, regardless of the consequences of any situation. The more knowledge you carry, the more sorrow follows on. He knew this fact and pressed on, with a feigned ignorance of just how depressed one may get from this habit. Sometimes he wondered if he didn't still have some form of a deathwish. "...I just know you're lucky...your wounds look like they were made...with a fatal strike..."
Her face paled even more, as if some unspoken fear had just been confirmed by his words. "...Fatal....?"
He chided himself once more for causing any form of anxiety in the liliputian knight.
"I'm afraid so...yes...but that doesn't mean you need to die now. Consider it positive that you're...still alive...despite..." He was reminded of the several documented cases of people who survived fatal strikes, only to die after learning the extent of their injuries. What they were made aware of, killed them where they would have originally healed and survived, had they been left without the knowledge of their plight altogether.
She frowned a bit more and her tone sounded almost like her healthy self again. "Eike... you're silly... if I die, Budehuc won't have anyone to protect it..." Her mouth turned down stubbornly.
What was said nearly triggered some kind of laughter inside him. It was a foreign emotion, rarely felt. He couldn't help but allow a minute ghost of a smile. He regarded her as one of the most commendable and strong persons that he'd ever had the pleasure of knowing for any extended peroid of time. "...oh...but lets not be an egotist Cecile..." He said slightly faster than normal, is own form of a humorous retaliation.
"You know it's true..." she seemed to relax against the pillow some more and closed her eyes.
He had to cave and give in to the fact of the matter; she really was the best defense barrier to their home. He pondered how many times he would have died if she hadn't been around.
"...Yes...tragedy would have occured more than once....if not for your ardor." He said in an eloquent manner. "But...let us not make you the first of a series of tragedies..."
The small girl smiled, her bangs falling over her eyebrows as her mind trailed off. "He's safe though... "
Eike entertained his curiousity as to who she meant exactly. "...Him...? Pardon, who is safe...?" He stopped averting his gaze and fixed back onto her, trying his best to ignore her bloody bandages. Eike pondered the girl's words and wondered further, with increasing fears, if she wasn't in fact, delirious. "...pardon me but...'who'...is safe...?" The context of ceciles words was very vague.
Her face took on a dreamlike quality of reassurance, as if nothing else mattered, as if there was not a nearly-fatal wound stitched up along her side. "Thomas is safe..."
He sat for a good long moment, silent, allowing the words to sink in. Eike settled on her being delirious. That could not, in his gloomy experience, be true. You would not have guessed it by his blank expression, but behind his eyes there stirred a trainwreck of conflictions, conflicting emotions, conflicting expectations, and conflicting logic. How? In Eike's experience, anyone who had been missing for the amount of time that Thomas had been missing, had been found dead or not found at all.
"...Surely this is some kind of sick bluff...you're not delirious...?" He allowed a little bit more of his internal monologue slip out than usual, normally no sadistic accusations would ever come out in the direction of Cecile, he would as soon accuse Muto of such plotted sadism as he would her; they were about as innocent as one could get without being angels. "...Forgive me...I dont mean to sound vile...but I...have my doubts..."
Suddenly it was as though the old Cecile was back, her eyes completely clear, but the emotion was fright--she looked over at her friend, whatever color her face had recovered draining away again. "He is... he is, but you mustn't say so...! Or then he might not be...!!"
Now things were becoming more familiar. More gruesome. Things rarely took positive turns. They more often than not, took the path that this situation was taking now. Eike felt much more at home now, far better accustomed to this life which was full-on mimicking that of a black and white film documenting some kind of tragic, eternal hell. He watched her color drain. If she was delirious then, she was more so now. That was a drop in blood pressure. It could be deadly in her delicate state. He never reacted. Never really. Now was one of those rare times in which Eike would be forced to react, the predictability of grim endings to everything seemed not to quell his human urge to keep them from happening, regardless of their commonness.
"...Cecile! Calm yourself!" He blinked, and nearly, slammed his hands down on her bedside. He would have slammed them down, except miliseconds of grasping his own reactive complex slowed him impeccably. He opened his eyes back up to meet hers, more fear piercing his haunted gaze than anger.
She hadn't seen any anger in his eyes like that time when he threatened the Zexen Knights, finalizing their retreat, all those years ago, back in those uncertain times during the War. Had Cecile been entirely well, Eike's reaction would have caught her off-guard, but she was already swept away in the emotion of the moment, the implications of the entire situation dawning on her.
"Eike... Eike you mustn't tell... please, please promise you won't tell."
"....You know I can keep a secret...Cecile..." although he wasn't entirely sure why he would keep the secret, he could without trying. Something sublingual about Cecile told him that saying a thing about Thomas's location would be more detrimental to his living status. Something inside Eike wanted to grasp at the filament of hope there was to be had, Cecile's words were veritable. But he knew from previous experiences that giving into any shred of hope meant a horrendous letdown if things did not favor it, to give in would to become weak and he could probably do without losing a few more years of his life to the scarring that tragedy and sorrow could leave. It was comparable to a Cirrhosis, only affecting the heart, not the liver. The more tragedy was let to affect, the more scarring could occur. Pretty soon the heart would be a massive scar, and the body would fail.
"...I will not tell...if you think it best...is it best...?" He waited for absolute confirmation. He wanted to be sure, fatally sure.
Even in her injured state, Cecile knew there was something deeper going on in Eike's mind, as if past his eyes she could see the gears whirring and hard at work. "Just... just don't say a word that he is.... please promise me..."
There were conflictions. Maddening conflictions. 'Something needs to be done, nothing needs to be said, tell regardless, do not!' His world was for the most part, silence; observed by those on the outside, to those not of his mind--to him it could be as loud as any rioting auditorium. But it was a simple compassionate side that would win in his internal melee. Of all the conflictions, it was that emotional logic: "Because her wishes should be respected" that won. Perhaps she knew something he didn't. It wouldn't be the first time, and it wouldn't be the last, if the situation wasn't diffused immediately that is; he noticed she was paling more.
"You...have my word." he said, his features softening as much as they ever could, to an uneducated onlooker who hadn't known Eike for years, it would have been observed as a sort of sullen stern grimace. For people who had known him for some time though, to them that look meant something exceedingly less offensive.
Her eyes closed, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Even though every ounce of her being knew Eike would never tell a soul if she gave him the whole story, but pure fear for Thomas's safety held her back from saying more. The most important thing was to put her friend's nerves at ease and at least let him know that their castle master was still alive. "I promise... I promise, promise, promise... I'll heal up fast... and he'll be back and okay."
"...No..." He shook his head, "I believe you...its quite alright...I understand...the situation...its..." he struggled to find the right word, hating himself for causing her anymore exertion. "...abstruse." The word was perfect, 'abstruse'. It could no more perfectly describe the intricacies of the situation as simply calling it 'complicated'. Complicated defined it well enough, but it was too simple even. When something is too complex to define it as complicated, it will be abstruse. Recondite. Incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding.
Horrible.
"...You...you should rest now Cecile...I've caused you too much stress...." he started, fumbling a book he had been holding on to for most of the evening. Perhaps now was not the best time.
Abstruse... she'd have to look that up later. Already the effects of the medicine were starting to reign her in--"you've been too active," it was telling her--"listen to him, it's time to rest." Cecile's eyes remained closed, even though she was facing him. "You have not... you have not caused me... an ounce of stress.. not even a little pinch of stress..."
There was that ounce of pain that one feels in one's chest, when one also feels touched. No stress? He found that hard to believe, but decided it best to remain without argument. If he accepted her claims it would help alleviate her further.
"...It's good to know..." he muttered, laying the book across his lap, looking to finalize the interaction. He didn't remember ever seeing her take on such a lavender tone. He didn't remember seeing anyone take on a lavender tone period, without dying hours later. Medical hands would have to be notified.
She murmured quietly, the painkiller medicine from Mathiu washing over her blissfully. How nice it was to hear a familiar voice... to have a familiar face...
He stood, and placed the small book of the many short fairytales he knew she had loved as a youth, on the stand by her bedside. Perhaps there would be another night, that she could hear those tales again...Surely when she woke up and saw the book, she would appreciate it, and without a doubt she would know who left it there. Until then, the girl had already slipped into a dreamless sleep, as if the two of them had never spoken.
The words exchanged, however, would not be forgotten.
Eike entered the infirmary, perpetually glum in his own, however, more so at the notion that a certain few he shared those rare fond memories with, was amongst the suffering. He remarked internally a notion marred with hatred at his own feelings of incapability, needing only a moments glance to see the horrific wounds upon young Cecile's once near perfect self. Truth be known, he would sometimes consider her with the fondness that a parent would, although it never showed, nor would ever show, upon his person.
"My my...how far we've come..." he muttered, sitting at her bedside, morosity intensifying.
Lying in the infirmary bed, Cecile looked almost peaceful, the only sign of injury reflected through the bandage on her face covering the healing welt and her pale skin. After the fiasco in the infirmary the night before that caused her to black out in pain when her medicine wore off, she had not woken up since.
Eike regarded her hesitantly, not wanting to look upon her. Nobody had the knowledge of it, him being such a sordid, secretive figure in the castle household, but he had in his past, lost many. He was a man perpetually marred by so much loss and sorrow that it permanently marred him on the inside, and on his exterior. Long ago, he had lost the ability to express much feeling to anyone at all, some would call his frigidity, a coping mechanism. If they only knew.
"...she is...like death..." he talked to himself, careful not to raise his voice above that of a morose whisper. He simply stared, a stone before her. He knew the pallid tone she had taken was mostly due to bloodloss.
Indeed, there seemed to be less life in her visage today than the night before. The fight in the infirmary did not cause her any bodily harm, but certainly destroyed something within her emotionally. It was most likely that the combination of her belated painkiller dose and the emotional stress was preventing her from waking up. He felt a familiar sickness well up within him. It had been felt several years prior in excess, during the rise of the Flame Champion, like a drug he had grown an ungodly tolerance to its presence in his system, acknowledging it and ignoring it at once. He had seen over the deaths of nearly three hundred people he had known in his entire life span, and cared not to see another. It was curious, how after each, he had entertained the notion of suicide and how it would be a merciful end to an endless torture.
He had long since concluded after the last entertainment of the notion, that it may in fact, cause more torture. Cecile had actually been a player in ending the notion in his mind once and for all, and she nor anyone else had any idea at all that he had wanted to die at any point in time. That was over ten years ago.
"...You're sick...you're strong though...much stronger than many..." he thought, placing his hands on his own lap. "I am confident..." he spoke aloud, and then paused, not ending his sentence in that familiar way he chose to speak.
As if hearing his voice, the petite girl opened her eyes slowly, then looked over to Eike. Her gaze was unfocused and unsteady, but there was a glimmering look of quiet curiosity hiding behind her eyes. For a moment, Eike was confounded, then shocked, and finally embarrassed and chided himself silently about how he had accidentally awakened Cecile surely, and how it would delay her progress at healing definitely. The only notion that anything at all was being processed behind his eyes, was the slight raising of his perpetually furrowed brow.
"...Oh no...you're awake. I'm sorry...it was unintentional..." he spoke, in a quiet voice. Eike's voice matched his appearance, sounding like some rending dirge, perhaps even, a deep and mournful requiem. It could be both piercingly fearful in its bane, and relaxing as the promise of an eternal sleep.
The only response from Cecile was a small smile, with both her eyes and her mouth--one of the first she gave since being admitted to the infirmary. The girl has always been obscenely chipper in any given situation, Eike puzzled about it endlessly over the years, confused at how anybody could be that chipper. A conclusion was never met. He summed it up to a misunderstanding of her functions altogether, he could never really be that profoundly happy.
"...I'm deeply concerned..." he paused and failed to finish the sentence. Was that kindness and caring really there inside him? Again, the thought was cut short by a roadblock. At the moment, he couldn't discern. Fear and anger are the same emotion--as is love and sorrow. Preoccupation with the matter aside, all feelings were noted but jumbled together as if his temporal lobe were a messy file cabinet.
Cecile simply watched him with her far away look, as if trying to discern where they were and what was going on. Only her eyes had moved, and they remained focused on the brooding man's face.
He was perceptive. He lived by the unbridled fact that the vast majority of linguistics where based around bodily movements. It was the simplest of languages, it was the very first form of language, everyone had a general understanding of it, not all were as enveloped by it as eike was. He had been a master of body language for eons.
"...oh...you're in the infirmary. Can you tell...?" He said, unconsciously throwing a deadpan gaze to her.
Her mouth slowly moved into a firm line, as if remembering what had happened the night before. "But... you're here too..." she murmured.
He resisted the urge to point out the obvious, sarcasm wasn't his cup of tea. "...Yes, I'm here..." Eike said. "But there are also others..."
"Ah..." She seemed a little more awake now than earlier, her expression hard to read. "I can't stay here..."
Ever the fervent one. He knew inside that Cecile would try to fulfill her duties while injured. She was perhaps, too fervent. Her perpetual cheer was as condemning as his stony disposition. Their character afflictions were both plagues in their own way.
"You can't...you know how close you came...right?" The sentence was spoken at the same time his vivid imagination of the melee took root for what was only a split second, but it was enough. He broke his gaze and began to look at a more inorganic object in the room. It was an action that to the knowledgeable psychiatrist, was a painfully blatant indicator of seeking solace in isolation. To put it simply, he began his ritual of hiding what was within him at the moment. A profound sadness coupled with a screaming, unanswered one word question. Why.
"Where did I go to...?" She looked at him blankly, an almost dreamlike haze reclaiming her expression thanks to the painkillers.
Another puzzle. He had a very small knowledge of exactly what had happened and where.
"I'm afraid...that I'm in the dark as much as you are...I was one of the last people to find out..." he took on a shaded look, making him look a good thirty more years old. The stress of not knowing about anything at all spurred him to further research the matter, regardless of the consequences of any situation. The more knowledge you carry, the more sorrow follows on. He knew this fact and pressed on, with a feigned ignorance of just how depressed one may get from this habit. Sometimes he wondered if he didn't still have some form of a deathwish. "...I just know you're lucky...your wounds look like they were made...with a fatal strike..."
Her face paled even more, as if some unspoken fear had just been confirmed by his words. "...Fatal....?"
He chided himself once more for causing any form of anxiety in the liliputian knight.
"I'm afraid so...yes...but that doesn't mean you need to die now. Consider it positive that you're...still alive...despite..." He was reminded of the several documented cases of people who survived fatal strikes, only to die after learning the extent of their injuries. What they were made aware of, killed them where they would have originally healed and survived, had they been left without the knowledge of their plight altogether.
She frowned a bit more and her tone sounded almost like her healthy self again. "Eike... you're silly... if I die, Budehuc won't have anyone to protect it..." Her mouth turned down stubbornly.
What was said nearly triggered some kind of laughter inside him. It was a foreign emotion, rarely felt. He couldn't help but allow a minute ghost of a smile. He regarded her as one of the most commendable and strong persons that he'd ever had the pleasure of knowing for any extended peroid of time. "...oh...but lets not be an egotist Cecile..." He said slightly faster than normal, is own form of a humorous retaliation.
"You know it's true..." she seemed to relax against the pillow some more and closed her eyes.
He had to cave and give in to the fact of the matter; she really was the best defense barrier to their home. He pondered how many times he would have died if she hadn't been around.
"...Yes...tragedy would have occured more than once....if not for your ardor." He said in an eloquent manner. "But...let us not make you the first of a series of tragedies..."
The small girl smiled, her bangs falling over her eyebrows as her mind trailed off. "He's safe though... "
Eike entertained his curiousity as to who she meant exactly. "...Him...? Pardon, who is safe...?" He stopped averting his gaze and fixed back onto her, trying his best to ignore her bloody bandages. Eike pondered the girl's words and wondered further, with increasing fears, if she wasn't in fact, delirious. "...pardon me but...'who'...is safe...?" The context of ceciles words was very vague.
Her face took on a dreamlike quality of reassurance, as if nothing else mattered, as if there was not a nearly-fatal wound stitched up along her side. "Thomas is safe..."
He sat for a good long moment, silent, allowing the words to sink in. Eike settled on her being delirious. That could not, in his gloomy experience, be true. You would not have guessed it by his blank expression, but behind his eyes there stirred a trainwreck of conflictions, conflicting emotions, conflicting expectations, and conflicting logic. How? In Eike's experience, anyone who had been missing for the amount of time that Thomas had been missing, had been found dead or not found at all.
"...Surely this is some kind of sick bluff...you're not delirious...?" He allowed a little bit more of his internal monologue slip out than usual, normally no sadistic accusations would ever come out in the direction of Cecile, he would as soon accuse Muto of such plotted sadism as he would her; they were about as innocent as one could get without being angels. "...Forgive me...I dont mean to sound vile...but I...have my doubts..."
Suddenly it was as though the old Cecile was back, her eyes completely clear, but the emotion was fright--she looked over at her friend, whatever color her face had recovered draining away again. "He is... he is, but you mustn't say so...! Or then he might not be...!!"
Now things were becoming more familiar. More gruesome. Things rarely took positive turns. They more often than not, took the path that this situation was taking now. Eike felt much more at home now, far better accustomed to this life which was full-on mimicking that of a black and white film documenting some kind of tragic, eternal hell. He watched her color drain. If she was delirious then, she was more so now. That was a drop in blood pressure. It could be deadly in her delicate state. He never reacted. Never really. Now was one of those rare times in which Eike would be forced to react, the predictability of grim endings to everything seemed not to quell his human urge to keep them from happening, regardless of their commonness.
"...Cecile! Calm yourself!" He blinked, and nearly, slammed his hands down on her bedside. He would have slammed them down, except miliseconds of grasping his own reactive complex slowed him impeccably. He opened his eyes back up to meet hers, more fear piercing his haunted gaze than anger.
She hadn't seen any anger in his eyes like that time when he threatened the Zexen Knights, finalizing their retreat, all those years ago, back in those uncertain times during the War. Had Cecile been entirely well, Eike's reaction would have caught her off-guard, but she was already swept away in the emotion of the moment, the implications of the entire situation dawning on her.
"Eike... Eike you mustn't tell... please, please promise you won't tell."
"....You know I can keep a secret...Cecile..." although he wasn't entirely sure why he would keep the secret, he could without trying. Something sublingual about Cecile told him that saying a thing about Thomas's location would be more detrimental to his living status. Something inside Eike wanted to grasp at the filament of hope there was to be had, Cecile's words were veritable. But he knew from previous experiences that giving into any shred of hope meant a horrendous letdown if things did not favor it, to give in would to become weak and he could probably do without losing a few more years of his life to the scarring that tragedy and sorrow could leave. It was comparable to a Cirrhosis, only affecting the heart, not the liver. The more tragedy was let to affect, the more scarring could occur. Pretty soon the heart would be a massive scar, and the body would fail.
"...I will not tell...if you think it best...is it best...?" He waited for absolute confirmation. He wanted to be sure, fatally sure.
Even in her injured state, Cecile knew there was something deeper going on in Eike's mind, as if past his eyes she could see the gears whirring and hard at work. "Just... just don't say a word that he is.... please promise me..."
There were conflictions. Maddening conflictions. 'Something needs to be done, nothing needs to be said, tell regardless, do not!' His world was for the most part, silence; observed by those on the outside, to those not of his mind--to him it could be as loud as any rioting auditorium. But it was a simple compassionate side that would win in his internal melee. Of all the conflictions, it was that emotional logic: "Because her wishes should be respected" that won. Perhaps she knew something he didn't. It wouldn't be the first time, and it wouldn't be the last, if the situation wasn't diffused immediately that is; he noticed she was paling more.
"You...have my word." he said, his features softening as much as they ever could, to an uneducated onlooker who hadn't known Eike for years, it would have been observed as a sort of sullen stern grimace. For people who had known him for some time though, to them that look meant something exceedingly less offensive.
Her eyes closed, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Even though every ounce of her being knew Eike would never tell a soul if she gave him the whole story, but pure fear for Thomas's safety held her back from saying more. The most important thing was to put her friend's nerves at ease and at least let him know that their castle master was still alive. "I promise... I promise, promise, promise... I'll heal up fast... and he'll be back and okay."
"...No..." He shook his head, "I believe you...its quite alright...I understand...the situation...its..." he struggled to find the right word, hating himself for causing her anymore exertion. "...abstruse." The word was perfect, 'abstruse'. It could no more perfectly describe the intricacies of the situation as simply calling it 'complicated'. Complicated defined it well enough, but it was too simple even. When something is too complex to define it as complicated, it will be abstruse. Recondite. Incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding.
Horrible.
"...You...you should rest now Cecile...I've caused you too much stress...." he started, fumbling a book he had been holding on to for most of the evening. Perhaps now was not the best time.
Abstruse... she'd have to look that up later. Already the effects of the medicine were starting to reign her in--"you've been too active," it was telling her--"listen to him, it's time to rest." Cecile's eyes remained closed, even though she was facing him. "You have not... you have not caused me... an ounce of stress.. not even a little pinch of stress..."
There was that ounce of pain that one feels in one's chest, when one also feels touched. No stress? He found that hard to believe, but decided it best to remain without argument. If he accepted her claims it would help alleviate her further.
"...It's good to know..." he muttered, laying the book across his lap, looking to finalize the interaction. He didn't remember ever seeing her take on such a lavender tone. He didn't remember seeing anyone take on a lavender tone period, without dying hours later. Medical hands would have to be notified.
She murmured quietly, the painkiller medicine from Mathiu washing over her blissfully. How nice it was to hear a familiar voice... to have a familiar face...
He stood, and placed the small book of the many short fairytales he knew she had loved as a youth, on the stand by her bedside. Perhaps there would be another night, that she could hear those tales again...Surely when she woke up and saw the book, she would appreciate it, and without a doubt she would know who left it there. Until then, the girl had already slipped into a dreamless sleep, as if the two of them had never spoken.
The words exchanged, however, would not be forgotten.