[INCOMPLETE]

[treastening]

Who: Lucrecia, anyone who wants to run into her and have their minds broken ♥ (open).
When: during the ball.
Where: the balcony on the second floor of the castle.
Rating: PGish.
Warnings: ... Lucrecia. By herself. Forming theories. About hypothermia. Baddd news.
Summary: Lucrecia can't really waste all the time at the ball socializing, can she?

Comments

[zacked]

Hanging out with Kadaj, it was something of inevitable: eventually his attention would wander, his agitation would grow and he would excuse himself. This was always done, of course, out of a social awkwardness and a lack of desire to interact in the first place, but there was also that ever present reason of finding his mother. Who had wandered off yet again and was sometimes difficult to keep up with, as crowded as the ball was becoming

[treastening]

By the time Kadaj and Zack finally reached her, she was visibly shaking, and the notebook had been tossed aside, fingers digging deep into the flesh at her arms in an attempt to still her body. Yet, despite the cold, she perked a little at their voices, and twisted her body around again (almost falling over in the process, considering the lack of muscle control hypothermia tended to bring along with it) so that she could see them. Her hand moved up from her arm in an extremely unsteady wave, and her jaw was trembling, teeth were chattering, and she looked unusually pale for someone standing outside in the freezing cold

[zacked]

As they drew closer, Zack’s cheerfulness and Kadaj’s curiosity turned to… well, concern. And who in their right mind (or even not in their right mind, as was generally the case with Kadaj) wouldn’t have been? From the way Lucrecia was looking, it was like she wasn’t doing well at all, and that seemed to be… all her doing, actually.

“Mother?” Kadaj asked, taking a step forward, closer to her. His brows knitted together slightly. He was torn between… well, letting her do whatever she was doing-certainly she knew what she was doing-and… well, common sense. Which definitely said it was about time to pick his mother up and take her back inside, before she got sick or worse.

Zack, meanwhile, was pulling a rare stunt: he was opting to go with common sense on this one. (Mainly just because he didn’t care to get punched by Cloud if he didn’t.) So, as he approached he was saying, “We’d love to keep you company, Lu, but I think we’re gonna have to do that inside. Where you’re not freezing to death.”

[treastening]

If their concern for her had been written blatantly across their features, she failed to notice and dismissed it with a small wave of her hand. She looked over a bare shoulder to where Kadaj and Zack stood (they were slowly getting closer, she noted; perhaps they were going to keep her company, after all?), and she offered them another smile (the best she could manage, anyway).

"Impossible," she said cheerfully, in response to Zack's statement. "I'm only in the second stage of hypothermia. Death doesn't occur until the third~"

That was, of course, supposed to be reassuring, in her odd little way, though it obviously wouldn't have been to two worried men who happened to be rather fond of her being alive. She was still hugging shaking limbs, and she tucked her chin down toward her chest, staring straight down into the glassy water at her feet. Little did they know that she had actually attempted something like this once before, back when she was a scientist working in ShinRa. Unfortunately, that event had ended up with her in the