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WHO: Faolan & Laurent
WHERE: Their (Laurent's) swanky apartment
WHEN: Various dates throughout the month
WHAT: Several moments throughout the month between their trips to their respective team locations.
WARNINGS: Laurent's mouth is not PG and neither are the dubious consent implications in regains

WEEK ONE
It's been one hell of a day, Faolan thinks to himself as he stumbles down the street to the apartment that he shares with Laurent. His shirt and jacket are covered in blood and hanging off of his shoulder where the wolf had bitten him, though there are hardly any people out on the street and those that are apparently have seen enough trauma today themselves they are paying the sight of it little heed. Which is probably for the best. All he wants is to get back to the apartment and make certain that Laurent does too.

It's only once he's riding in the lift up to their door itself that he realizes he probably might have sent the other man a message checking in. But if he was in the middle of something he doesn't want to distract him and risk his life with a text. Who knows what Laurent had encountered down in the depths of those subways. Perhaps Laurent has made it back before him -- perhaps he will not make it back for a while yet. Faolan laments the fact that he will have to get used to not being able to perform his full duties, as he carefully sets the key in the lock in the front door and lets himself in.

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Laurent is tired, ruffled and somewhat frustrated. He knew at least one person in the small group Retrospec assigned him, but that didn't make the whole situation any easier. It was ridiculous, and Laurent didn't feel at all useful or prepared for the situation. Faolan, he reasons, likely was. Faolan was a bodyguard, after all. Whatever situation he ended up in, likely he adapted easily and made progress rather than flailing about with a mop and then watching people pointlessly argue.

The streets are somewhat quieter, but Laurent's building is at least still populated with some security staff. He makes his way in and calls the lift, finally unlocking the door somewhat later and half-stumbling through it. He throws his keys down into a bowl near the door, and begins tiredly toeing off his shoes and wrenching his jacket off and his stumbles across the room.

Faolan glances up at the other man as he enters, from where he has been sitting at the kitchen island. He might have found a more comfortable seat on the sofa but he couldn't guarantee that he wouldn't get blood all over it, and somehow he thinks Laurent would take offense to that. He had been halfway to taking a shower, dumping his jacket over the back of one of the stools as he'd entered, when he'd ran his fingers over his shoulder and discovered a roughness to the skin beneath. A roughness of scar tissue that had not been there before, in the exact shape of the bite that had flashed through his memory as he'd fought those wolves, and it had all been a bit too much.

Faolan had poured himself a glass of the strongest alcohol they'd had in the apartment and he'd sat himself down on the breakfast island to wait for Laurent to return as well. So lost in his thoughts that once he does he stands up so fast he nearly trips and spills his drink at the same time.

"You're back," he says. Realizing only after the fact how the comment must sound to the other man, and how he must have looked while saying it for that matter.

"Yes," Laurent replies absently, and he's unbuttoning his shirt when he turns and finally takes in Faolan's appearance. His fingers freeze on the buttons and his eyes widen a little.

"What happened?"

Since clearly something did, Faolan looks an absolute mess. A fight, presumably? Has he had it treated?

The look on Laurent's face clues Faolan in on the fact that something is off, though it takes him a moment to connect the dots and realize that that something is him.

He shifts awkwardly for a moment, though there's nothing to cover himself so he stops fidgeting once he realizes that. Glancing at the newly-appeared scar on his shoulder, the same shoulder that is still largely caked with blood from his earlier bite, he stares at it for too long before looking back at Laurent.

"I was... Attacked by a wolf," he says. Though whether this is from the shadow wolf or the wolf in his -- dreams? His mind? His memory? His past? He cannot say for certain.

"A wolf?!"

He abandons fussing with his shirt and crosses the space quickly, frowning at the mess of blood and -- scar tissue? That must be older, then, but still.

"Have you cleaned it? You'll need a rabies vaccine, I should think."

Since a bite from a wolf is not likely to be a clean affair. He crosses around to the cupboard anyway, begins digging for something to wash the blood off with so he can get a better look.

"There was a man who was with us," Faolan says, after a stunned moment of watching Laurent cross to him and examine his shoulder. He supposes he really should have cleaned it off himself, but he'd been. Preoccupied, he supposes. He had understood the theory of former selves, or separate selves, depending on who you listened to, but he'd never really had such an immediate encounter. Not like this, anyway.

"He healed it," he continues, coming back to his point. "With -- magic, I suppose. Or I thought he did. It stopped bleeding and it stopped hurting and I suppose that I just assumed..." He trails off, glancing down at his shoulder again, slightly alarmed at it himself.

"I don't trust magic; I trust science."

Laurent returns a moment later with a small bowl of lukewarm water and a clean cloth, wets it and carefully begins to clean off the dark blood so he can get a better look at wound (or scar) itself.

"I can't employee a bodyguard who cannot use their arm, nor one who has rabies. It may not exist in France but it does out here, you will get this looked at and you will make sure you are vaccinated."

Faolan nods slightly. "I'm not certain whether these creatures could even carry the disease, they were... Made of shadow? Or something like it. They were able to pass in and out of existence as they desired. But I can get the vaccine. Just to be safe."

He watches as Laurent cleans the blood away. It's not the first time he's been injured on the job by any means but the way it happened and the fact that he cannot understand whether this came from the wolf today or the wolf in his mind leaves him feeling slightly unsteady.

"What about you?" Faolan asks, his eyes dark as he searches Laurent's face as he works. "Are you alright? What happened down there?"

Edited 2017-08-20 17:58 (UTC)

"I hit faceless monkeys with a mop and watched people argue with Retrospec employees. Nothing bit me, at least. Is this from the bite? Did the man tell you it would scar?"

He hasn't particularly examined Faolan closely, but Laurent thinks he would have noticed a scar of this size before had it been there. Did magic leave scars? Does it depend on the wound? Not knowing what is normal and what is not bothers him, leaves him uneasy as he cleans the area. How would he know if something had gone wrong?

Faolan glances down at his shoulder again and he shakes his head slightly at the question.

"I don't know," he replies, honestly. "I would have thought that... If a man were to use magic to heal another, that it wouldn't leave quite so obvious a mark behind. And besides that, there was..." He trails off for a moment, taking in a deep breath, letting it out slowly before glancing back up at Laurent. "I remember being attacked once before. Bitten on my shoulder, just like this. But I do not know..."

He glances back down at himself again. He's been doing a lot of this, since he noticed the scar's sudden appearance. "I cannot say for certain which instance this is from. If such a thing is even possible. An injury gained from a memory..."

From a memory. Laurent dips the cloth into the water again to clean it, wrings it out as he considers this.

"If our memories truly are from... another life, how would it be possible for them to make a physical change?"

It makes no sense to Laurent, yet then again none of this does. He cleans the scar tissue carefully, and tries not to imagine how big the wolf might have been.

"There was lot of blood."

It was more than just a scratch. This should have been deep. This should have required a doctor.

Edited (Belated typo correction ) 2017-08-23 12:05 (UTC)

Faolan glances down at his shoulder again as Laurent works on cleaning it off and nods slightly, before motioning to his jacket and shirt, slung over the stool nearby. "There were twelve of them at once," he says, by way of explanation. "It was hard to keep track of them all, especially with the way they seemed to pop in and out of the shadows." And Faolan had not exactly been as well-armed as his companions. The knife he had brought along had served him well, but the gun would have only summoned more of them, as they'd found out rather early on.

"I suppose that I was lucky that one of the people I was with could heal it for me in the first, or tonight might have ended rather differently," he allows, reaching a hand up and tracing it against the scar Laurent is uncovering. It certainly feels like a scar, anyway. But it hardly feels real. One is not supposed to acquire an old wound without really remembering the injury in the first place. He stares at his fingers for a moment, before wiping them off on his jeans.

"I've been told that another theory is that this is an issue of separate selves," he says. "Multiverse, that sort of thing." Rosalind explained it a lot better than he'll ever be able to, but he'll certainly try to give it a go, for Laurent's sake.

Laurent zones out a little, carefully washing the dried blood away. I was lucky that one of the people I was with could heal it for me. That's true, he thinks. If someone had not been here to heal it --

Laurent was kneeling on the wet marble hundreds of miles from home, pressing this stranger's left hand against the wound.

"There's a lot of blood," said Laurent.

"Luckily," he says, "I brought a physician."

Laurent lets out a breath, a strange airless sound.

He blinks and sways a little, eyes focusing on the dark smears of blood once more.

"Yes," he says absently, then lifts his eyes to fix on Faolan's. "That sort of thing."

Faolan may be a little shaken himself, but he catches the slight sway that Laurent makes before he glances up to meet his eyes. He frowns slightly, his brows drawn together as he studies the other man's expression, and asks, "Laurent?"

If it's the sight of the blood that's getting to him, he can stop. Faolan doesn't think that there's really a wound there, just this scar that had suddenly appeared at the thought of it. The memory, really. It's in roughly the same place as where the shadow wolf had bitten him earlier, but that could have been merely coincidence. A man's shoulder presents quite the target, especially in a fight, and he hadn't really gotten a good look at the wound before Ardyn had healed it, however he'd done so.

"I was just imagining," Laurent covers smoothly, "how much worse this could have been with nobody to heal you."

He goes back to carefully cleaning off the dried blood again, stopping to wring out the cloth a few times.

"I might have been forced to hire a new bodyguard."

Faolan cannot help but quirk something of a smile at that. While he isn't exactly certain whether Laurent is telling the truth or not, he will take it for now.

"And how might you ever replace me?" Faolan asks the other man, airily. "Especially in a place like this. We're going to have to revisit the idea of employing natives on the side in the first..." Faolan had not been happy with what had happened after the convention, when Laurent's then bodyguard had abandoned ship.

"All the best things are imported, that is why America makes so little of its own products."

He finishes cleaning the blood off finally and sets the cloth down, lifts a hand to trace the scare with absent curiosity. It doesn't seem new, but could that be down to magic? He would have to compare, he supposes, with other wounds closed by the same craft.

"It seems cleanly closed."

At least, so far as he can tell. No amount of washing and poking will tell him if some infection is yet to come, of course. Only time will.

Faolan flashes a smile at the other man at the first comment, raising an eyebrow at him slightly as he can't help but speak up to comment, "Careful. Words like that, I might almost come to take them as a compliment..."

He glances down again at his shoulder, following Laurent's examination as best he can given the angle. Resisting the shiver that creeps up his spine at the press of the other man's hands against his skin, the trace of his fingers against the sensitive tissue of the scar that -- while it looks and feels old -- had not previously been there before.

"It feels healed," he replies. "That is, when the shadow wolf bit me, there were... Side effects. But they went away as soon as he worked his magic. That's why I thought he'd healed the wound." He shrugs. "There isn't really any way of knowing which wolf this came from. Unless..." He trails off, paling slightly.

Laurent is exhausted when he gets home for the day. His muscles ache, but a hot shower gives some relief and by the time he's draped on the sofa flicking through his phone Laurent at least feels cleaner and a little more human. He's dressed down into a loose t-shirt emblazoned with Now That's What I Call Edgy and a pair of boxers, blandly reading through posts while he waits for Faolan to return from whatever experience he has ended up having this time. Less wolves, hopefully. He's barely aware that he's even falling asleep, although he is aware eventually that it's dark and there was an odd sensation of grogginess--

there had been an ambush, he was underground, and since his body didn't feel as if it had been transported for days, that meant—

He opened his eyes and met the flat-nosed stare of Govart.

"Hello, Princess."

When he startles awake, for what feels like a second time now, Laurent still isn't fully sure if it's real or not. Everything is dark, and he finds himself flailing off fabric that he doesn't remember being there before. He scrambles to his feet, cursing in French until the little home device finally responds and the apartment is flooded with light. The blanket, which Laurent doesn't remember picking up, falls into a tangle on the ground about his feet.

"Unless?"

His eyes lift from the scar, studying Faolan curiously for a long moment. Unless what? Are 'shadow wolves', whatever that means, particularly different or some way when they bite?

"If you tell me you are in danger of changing under a full moon I won't believe it."

Laurent's suspension of disbelief has already been stretched a long way this week, there isn't much more he can take. Shadow werewolves is definitely pushing things.

It has been...a long day for Faolan. Though there were no more shadow wolves to battle (thank god, he is not certain how many more fights with those creatures he can handle) there had been a long bout of wandering first around the woods and then around a large church with a lot of puzzles and riddles to have to solve, conversations to have, and personalities to field. By the time Faolan makes it back to the apartment it is late and he is exhausted.

As he lets himself into the apartment he is relieved to find that Laurent has made it back first himself this time. He takes a long moment to regard the other man from where he has passed out on the couch -- he must have been tired, for that -- before he quietly pads across the room and across the apartment to fetch a blanket and gently drape it across the other man. Fetching a bottle of water from the refrigerator and making sure the door is locked, Faolan does his best not to disturb Laurent as he switches off the lights and retreats down the hall and into his room.

Stripping down until he is only in his boxers, Faolan tabs around on his phone, attempting to uncover what he can of these founders they will apparently need to deal with. Being so new to the city, he had hardly heard anything about them before now, but everything he's finding they seem to have already proven wrong. Frustrated, Faolan sets his phone aside and allows his eyes to begin to droop shut. Finding himself just on the edge of sleep, when all of a sudden the lights flash on, temporarily blinding him and waking him up in the flash of a second, and Faolan finds himself up and out of bed and into the hallway even before that, his gun in his hand as he readies himself to face down whatever intruder had managed to find their way past the security system. Blinking across the living room as he quickly finds the culprit.

"Laurent...?"

Laurent has backed himself against one of the low wooden tables and is, very slowly and carefully, trying to move so his back is against one of the glass walls instead. The blinds are down, at least, so he doesn't feel too exposed in that regard, but there's still a slight wild edge to his nerves.

"Check the rooms," he snaps quickly, "all of them."

The face in his memory isn't one he recognises, and there's always a chance it could have been a dream but -- but, equally, there's always a chance it wasn't too.

Faolan does not need telling twice. This is what he has been hired to do after all. Perhaps not in his boxers, but this is certainly what he has been hired to do. Nodding, he steps forward, and leading with his gun he makes a quick and thorough sweep of the main area of the apartment, the room where Laurent is and the kitchen before disappearing into the hallways beyond. Making a quick and thorough sweep of every room beyond as well. Bathrooms, bedrooms, Laurent's and his own, even going out onto the balconies, methodically making his way out from the center point where he had left Laurent.

What he finds on this sweep are a lot of empty rooms, with all of the lights turned on but otherwise unoccupied. By the time he makes it back through the apartment to where Laurent is, he is fairly confident that they are the only two in the apartment together, enough so that he lowers his gun when he speaks to the other man. "All the rooms are empty. Nothing out of the ordinary." His eyebrows furrow at the wild-eyed, nervous edge to the other man, before he continues to ask, "What happened? What did you see?"

He inches away from the glass after a moment, warily picks his way to a chair and sits down with conscious deliberateness. Laurent is reining himself in, body language closed off as much as he can. The quick rise and fall of his chest has been reduced to something slower and more controlled, and he knits his fingers together into his lap.

"You're sure?" he prompts. Whoever that man was, he wants no trace of him in this apartment. For all Laurent knows he could be laying in wait somewhere, although for what he cannot say. The thought makes him uneasy regardless, while also making Laurent feel awkwardly childish. As if he's sending his bodyguard to hunt down monsters under the bed.

Only monsters seem to be very real. They've both seen them.

Faolan wishes he knew what he was looking for, but he nods his head once again, casting a glance about the apartment around them with his gun held loosely but still somewhat at the ready (just in case he had been mistaken) before turning back to look at the other man.

"What happened?" he repeats again, for it bears repeating. All he knows is that he was almost asleep when all of a sudden the lights came on, there was crashing in the living room, and then Laurent has him searching the whole place. He steps forward, doing one more thorough pass around the kitchen and main area of the apartment before turning back to Laurent.

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WEEK 2

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