CRIUS ST CLAIR :: A DRABBLE The vicomte and his lady wife were ascending the drive. Dressed in their velvets and finery, they looked like a pair of Iberian parakeets. The curtains fell back into place, plunging the room into darkness.The dark was alight, though. The darkness had never bothered him, not truly. Besides, it was his room and he knew it well enough. Well, that was a lie. Crius St Clair hadn’t spent a night in this room since he’d been seventeen years old, and returning to it made him feel uneasy. Nothing about the floral wallpaper, the cream colored curtains, or angels painted upon the ceiling was his. Especially the angels.The room had been preserved. Kept clean and tidy and ever awaiting his return. That had been his mother’s doing, he knew. Jaeger was sentimental that way.The mattress creaked as he took his seat, his hands coming to clasp in his waist. He could feel the tremors starting. The nervousness rising like tar in the back of his throat. Crius didn’t like the vicomte. Nor did he like the man’s simpering wife or their mouse-faced daughter Matilde. He didn’t like the maids, nor his nanny, nor the cooks, the ground keepers, the ladies and lads of court or the guards and their jests.Crius didn’t like anyone.Sweat soaked palms rose to his head, brushing back uncombed, unwashed locks. His mouth twisted, his eyes stung with a need for sleep that wouldn’t come. For the first time in months, Crius St Clair was sober; and it was killing him. He was aware of the laughing down the hall, the subtle thud of lovemaking a door or two down. He could hear the clop hooves of the vicomte’s carriage rolled away, and the sound of trumpets from below as their presence was announced.The prince’s nose wrinkled. Jaeger liked their company. The Germanian /liked/ people. He liked interacting with the various nobles scattered across St Clair and the rest of Gaullia. He loved the Iberians and their mummers, and the Dhijari with their monkeys and their magics. It was for his mother alone that Crius had agreed to go downstairs to meet with the vicomte, his wife, and their daughter.He fidgeted, feeling the pouch in his pocket and being unable to touch it. He could feel the veins pulsing in his wrists and arms, could feel the bruising, and more so, the need to lose himself. He didn’t like this place. He didn’t like this room. “They’re here until eight. Eight. Eight. F - five hours. No. Four fours, forty-nine minutes. Seven seconds. Three. Four hours, forty-eight minutes. Fifty-five seconds.”He brought a hand to his jaw, scratching at the coarse layer of stubble that grew there. Jaeger wouldn’t be happy, and the thought sent a wave of guilt washing over him. His mother hoped that he’d take an interest in Matilde. He’d even taken him aside to tell him what a sweet girl she was. How she brought happiness into the lives of everyone she touched. How pretty and gifted she was. At needlework, singing, even cooking. She loved to read (a mutual interest they shared, Jaeger had pointed out), and was a fan of poetry and dance.Crius didn’t care. He understood Jaeger’s attempts, though he wished the Germanian wouldn’t bother himself. However disinclined he was to follow through with his mother’s plans, doctor Fitzroy’s suggestions were worse. She’d gone so far as to suggest to Jaeger that his lab be sealed up and his experiments destroyed.Well, the lab had been sealed, but from the inside. During one of his highs, he’d boarded, and then later bricked himself in to keep the others out and away. Caroline had made short work of his efforts, however, and he’d spent the rest of that day and much of the next in the infirmary, sobbing over his work. That had been a year and a half ago, and his laboratory still stood.Though his parents still made the effort to speak with him, he assumed the reason it remained was to keep him out of sight. The less Gaullia saw and heard of its prince, the better. He suspected his father bore him some level of animosity after he’d renounced his claim to the throne. It was a silly thought. Lo was more Renard’s child than he’d ever been. Aside from a few reckless teenage years (in which he’d broken his nose twice, and nearly killed himself half a dozen times), he’d never been much like Gaullia’s mad king.He’d been sixteen when he’d happened upon the vault. He’d been chasing Maestro through the dungeons when the little terrier had squeezed below a missing section of wall and disappeared. Crius had sat on the opposite side for over an hour, calling and calling until his voice had gone raw and his tears had dried up. When the dog did not return, he stamped out his fear, found himself a lamp, and squeezed in after him. It turned out that the space beyond the wall had once been a goaler’s hall. Ancient, molding furniture had been shoved up against the walls, some rotted down to the boards.There were three connecting rooms, a privy, and even a small library, though the books all crumbled at his touch. He found Maestro asleep on his back upon one of the old beds, and when roused, the little bastard had, had the gall to grin up at him.The very next day, despite Jaeger’s protests, a group of architects had set to work removing a section of the wall. The vault was cleaned, the furniture replaced, the library re-shelved and re-booked. They hung lamps and even set up a door, and by the end of the week even the air was fresher and stairs leading to his new bedroom were safe.Jaeger had been appalled. Renard had said he was just having fun, and that had been—so far as he saw—the end of that.At first, his lab had been nothing more than a place to hide from the castle and its staff. Crius had always been shy, but in recent years his anxiety around people had begun to grow worse and worse. Jaeger had told him he just needed to talk to people more. That if he did that, they wouldn’t seem so scary. He wasn’t afraid of people. He just hated them.The vault became his laboratory close to his eighteenth name day. As children, Renard had entertained them with bits of machinery, and Lo had loved it. Crius had never been particularly gifted at engineering, and usually watched from the sidelines as his sister crafted some sort of coil or gun. He’d never properly understood it. What he had liked had been the castle’s scientists. Not the men themselves, but their work. More often than not he’d followed after them, watching as they tinkered with specimens, both flora and fauna alike. He’d watched them create acids and bicker over formulas like children over whose sandcastle was best.When they allowed him to watch, not only had they begun a process, but they’d allowed him to learn. Crius had found himself fascinated by chemical reaction. How two harmless ingredients, when combined, could become lethal, or how certain plants, when stewed and filleted could cause a man to fall unconsciousness. It was all amazing.And so he’d bought his own equipment. Beakers and test tubes, syringes and furnaces. Petri dishes, magnifying lenses and all the specimens he could ever ask for had been settled in his rooms, and from that moment on, Crius was never the same.At first his experiments had been casual. He’d grown crystals in dishes with little more than a few items from the kitchens, though that had been a trivial waste of time. After that he’d began to tinker with acids, testing their pH levels with a special grade of paper he’d invented. The notes were endless. There was something about the destructive capabilities they held that utterly fascinated him, and so he delved into their usage and their strengths with something akin to greed. The most powerful acids couldn’t be properly distilled in water. Their makeup was astounding, and as far as he could see, they seemed to adapt by converting protons into ions to maintain their acidity.But soon that hadn’t been enough either. He’d been of a mind to attempt cross breeding in plants when it happened. The plants had come from Dhijari. They were vibrant, their leafs a spider’s web of crisscrossing yellow and green veins. They were among many types, but the man who delivered them pointed it out specifically. Crius had never in his life given thought to drug use, though he’d heard enough about the Eastern plant Valhalla’s Fern to know of them. It caused laziness, he’d heard. Lethargy, stupidity, and a million other things Crius didn’t care for. But not the coca plant.It was an experiment. That’s what he’d told himself as he’d prepared the leaves, grinding and crushing them in the mortal until they were naught but a thin, grey powder. He’d bagged the sample he’d created and had let it be for almost a week before he’d worked up enough courage to return to it. Cutting a small amount into a line with his bread knife, Crius had steeled himself and railed it straight.A week later he found himself wandering St Clair in search of herbal shops. He questioned any herbologist or hedge witch he found, and before long found himself putting orders through to Dhijari, Iberia, and even Albion and Samarkand. A year later he even contacted scientists in Nippon, interested in a new crystal component they’d created called methyl alpha-methylphenylethylamine.To test bases, oils, acids, and reactions was interesting, but all those tests had grown boring before long. But the hallucinogens, the psychoactives, they were an experiment within himself. To watch a reaction was one thing, but to /feel/ it happen was a whole new level. And it had been fun. Even alone, Crius had found himself enjoying every second of it.Until his nineteenth birthday.Until that night, Crius had never had a problem. But when the needle had gone in and the chemical had begun to take hold, things were different. Somehow he’d willed himself out of his room, and up and out of the dungeons. At several points in time the world had gone dark, only to come back into focus a while later.After however long, he returned to himself and found his parents staring at him, as well as a myriad of guests. Jaeger had looked horrified, his eyes wide and his hands over his mouth. The others all looked the same, but it was his mother’s face that he looked into as he stood there, his clothing covered in stains, his eyes red, his nose and gums bleeding, his arms lined with track marks. He remembered the world tilting, and he remembered retching a long line of milky white vomit onto the carpets before pitching over. It had been his mother’s scream that he’d heard last.Crius pushed the hair from his face again. He’d received his title that night, ‘La honte de St Clair’. The shame of St Clair. The rumors spread like wildfire. That he was inept. Possessed. A freak, a demon, a simpleton. That his parents kept him in the dungeons to keep him out of the public eye. And that had driven Crius underground for good.Nowadays, he left only to take the odd meal with his family, or for the rarer bath. Sometimes he’d visit Jaeger, and sometimes he’d visit his sister. He owed his life to Apollo, and to Caroline. Both had pulled his sorry ass out from death’s door more times than he could count, and so he made a point of being clean when he did. Those visits were becoming rarer too.And now he had to sit through a good four hours of Matilde’s simpering questions. She played her part beautifully. Laughing at his answers, touching his hands and shoulders, smiling at him, the compliments..They made him uncomfortable. He would fidget when touched, mutter his replies, and more often than not would stutter so badly every second or third word that his sentences were indiscernible.She didn’t actually love him, it didn’t matter. If Matilde suffered him, it was for a title and a voice in court for her father. Nothing else. The thought angered him. No woman ever looked at him with a real smile.Not even his sister. There was always pity in those eyes, or was it disgust? Sometimes he wasn’t sure. Only Caroline. The automaton had told him countless times that his practices were unwise, but had never moved to stop him. She’d saved his life though, a dozen times, maybe more. And she was beautiful. With her large, turquoise eyes and a thick head of fine brown hair. She had a smile that could light the world, and never once had she sneered at him, called him La honte de St Clair, or laughed at him.Renard called Caroline his sister, but there was no blood between them. The woman was a machine, crafted and constructed. She was dear to his heart, but not family. Not in the way his father saw her. Crius couldn’t look at her as a sister, the idea made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t desire a sister in the way he wanted Caroline.It was a perverse thought, one he’d struggled with for years, though the ‘struggling’ was less now. Even the thought of her roused him, and he was often prone to moments of weakness in the dead of the night.Despite the wants and the pinning, Crius had never moved to say anything. Nor would he, he thought. The automaton couldn’t rightly understand love, and he wasn’t even sure if she was … complete. The thought alone was enough to bring a blush creeping up his neck. He might have humored the thought longer had a knock not sounded. Jumping a tad, the Gaullian prince turned to face the door, muttering:“Y - yes?”“Sire? Your guests are ready to receive you.”“Yes. C - coming. Coming.” Crius stood and rolled his sleeves down, mumbling as he went:“They’re n - not my guests.”

CRIUS ST CLAIR :: A DRABBLE

The vicomte and his lady wife were ascending the drive. Dressed in their velvets and finery, they looked like a pair of Iberian parakeets. The curtains fell back into place, plunging the room into darkness.

The dark was alight, though. The darkness had never bothered him, not truly. Besides, it was his room and he knew it well enough. Well, that was a lie. Crius St Clair hadn’t spent a night in this room since he’d been seventeen years old, and returning to it made him feel uneasy. Nothing about the floral wallpaper, the cream colored curtains, or angels painted upon the ceiling was his. Especially the angels.
The room had been preserved. Kept clean and tidy and ever awaiting his return. That had been his mother’s doing, he knew. Jaeger was sentimental that way.

The mattress creaked as he took his seat, his hands coming to clasp in his waist. He could feel the tremors starting. The nervousness rising like tar in the back of his throat. Crius didn’t like the vicomte. Nor did he like the man’s simpering wife or their mouse-faced daughter Matilde. He didn’t like the maids, nor his nanny, nor the cooks, the ground keepers, the ladies and lads of court or the guards and their jests.
Crius didn’t like anyone.

Sweat soaked palms rose to his head, brushing back uncombed, unwashed locks. His mouth twisted, his eyes stung with a need for sleep that wouldn’t come. For the first time in months, Crius St Clair was sober; and it was killing him. He was aware of the laughing down the hall, the subtle thud of lovemaking a door or two down. He could hear the clop hooves of the vicomte’s carriage rolled away, and the sound of trumpets from below as their presence was announced.
The prince’s nose wrinkled. Jaeger liked their company. The Germanian /liked/ people. He liked interacting with the various nobles scattered across St Clair and the rest of Gaullia. He loved the Iberians and their mummers, and the Dhijari with their monkeys and their magics. It was for his mother alone that Crius had agreed to go downstairs to meet with the vicomte, his wife, and their daughter.

He fidgeted, feeling the pouch in his pocket and being unable to touch it. He could feel the veins pulsing in his wrists and arms, could feel the bruising, and more so, the need to lose himself. He didn’t like this place. He didn’t like this room.
“They’re here until eight. Eight. Eight. F - five hours. No. Four fours, forty-nine minutes. Seven seconds. Three. Four hours, forty-eight minutes. Fifty-five seconds.”
He brought a hand to his jaw, scratching at the coarse layer of stubble that grew there. Jaeger wouldn’t be happy, and the thought sent a wave of guilt washing over him. His mother hoped that he’d take an interest in Matilde. He’d even taken him aside to tell him what a sweet girl she was. How she brought happiness into the lives of everyone she touched. How pretty and gifted she was. At needlework, singing, even cooking. She loved to read (a mutual interest they shared, Jaeger had pointed out), and was a fan of poetry and dance.

Crius didn’t care. He understood Jaeger’s attempts, though he wished the Germanian wouldn’t bother himself. However disinclined he was to follow through with his mother’s plans, doctor Fitzroy’s suggestions were worse. She’d gone so far as to suggest to Jaeger that his lab be sealed up and his experiments destroyed.
Well, the lab had been sealed, but from the inside. During one of his highs, he’d boarded, and then later bricked himself in to keep the others out and away. Caroline had made short work of his efforts, however, and he’d spent the rest of that day and much of the next in the infirmary, sobbing over his work.

That had been a year and a half ago, and his laboratory still stood.

Though his parents still made the effort to speak with him, he assumed the reason it remained was to keep him out of sight. The less Gaullia saw and heard of its prince, the better. He suspected his father bore him some level of animosity after he’d renounced his claim to the throne. It was a silly thought. Lo was more Renard’s child than he’d ever been. Aside from a few reckless teenage years (in which he’d broken his nose twice, and nearly killed himself half a dozen times), he’d never been much like Gaullia’s mad king.

He’d been sixteen when he’d happened upon the vault. He’d been chasing Maestro through the dungeons when the little terrier had squeezed below a missing section of wall and disappeared. Crius had sat on the opposite side for over an hour, calling and calling until his voice had gone raw and his tears had dried up. When the dog did not return, he stamped out his fear, found himself a lamp, and squeezed in after him. It turned out that the space beyond the wall had once been a goaler’s hall. Ancient, molding furniture had been shoved up against the walls, some rotted down to the boards.
There were three connecting rooms, a privy, and even a small library, though the books all crumbled at his touch. He found Maestro asleep on his back upon one of the old beds, and when roused, the little bastard had, had the gall to grin up at him.

The very next day, despite Jaeger’s protests, a group of architects had set to work removing a section of the wall. The vault was cleaned, the furniture replaced, the library re-shelved and re-booked. They hung lamps and even set up a door, and by the end of the week even the air was fresher and stairs leading to his new bedroom were safe.
Jaeger had been appalled. Renard had said he was just having fun, and that had been—so far as he saw—the end of that.

At first, his lab had been nothing more than a place to hide from the castle and its staff. Crius had always been shy, but in recent years his anxiety around people had begun to grow worse and worse. Jaeger had told him he just needed to talk to people more. That if he did that, they wouldn’t seem so scary.
He wasn’t afraid of people. He just hated them.

The vault became his laboratory close to his eighteenth name day. As children, Renard had entertained them with bits of machinery, and Lo had loved it. Crius had never been particularly gifted at engineering, and usually watched from the sidelines as his sister crafted some sort of coil or gun. He’d never properly understood it. What he had liked had been the castle’s scientists. Not the men themselves, but their work. More often than not he’d followed after them, watching as they tinkered with specimens, both flora and fauna alike. He’d watched them create acids and bicker over formulas like children over whose sandcastle was best.
When they allowed him to watch, not only had they begun a process, but they’d allowed him to learn. Crius had found himself fascinated by chemical reaction. How two harmless ingredients, when combined, could become lethal, or how certain plants, when stewed and filleted could cause a man to fall unconsciousness. It was all amazing.

And so he’d bought his own equipment. Beakers and test tubes, syringes and furnaces. Petri dishes, magnifying lenses and all the specimens he could ever ask for had been settled in his rooms, and from that moment on, Crius was never the same.
At first his experiments had been casual. He’d grown crystals in dishes with little more than a few items from the kitchens, though that had been a trivial waste of time. After that he’d began to tinker with acids, testing their pH levels with a special grade of paper he’d invented. The notes were endless. There was something about the destructive capabilities they held that utterly fascinated him, and so he delved into their usage and their strengths with something akin to greed.

The most powerful acids couldn’t be properly distilled in water. Their makeup was astounding, and as far as he could see, they seemed to adapt by converting protons into ions to maintain their acidity.
But soon that hadn’t been enough either. He’d been of a mind to attempt cross breeding in plants when it happened. The plants had come from Dhijari. They were vibrant, their leafs a spider’s web of crisscrossing yellow and green veins. They were among many types, but the man who delivered them pointed it out specifically.

Crius had never in his life given thought to drug use, though he’d heard enough about the Eastern plant Valhalla’s Fern to know of them. It caused laziness, he’d heard. Lethargy, stupidity, and a million other things Crius didn’t care for. But not the coca plant.
It was an experiment. That’s what he’d told himself as he’d prepared the leaves, grinding and crushing them in the mortal until they were naught but a thin, grey powder. He’d bagged the sample he’d created and had let it be for almost a week before he’d worked up enough courage to return to it. Cutting a small amount into a line with his bread knife, Crius had steeled himself and railed it straight.

A week later he found himself wandering St Clair in search of herbal shops. He questioned any herbologist or hedge witch he found, and before long found himself putting orders through to Dhijari, Iberia, and even Albion and Samarkand. A year later he even contacted scientists in Nippon, interested in a new crystal component they’d created called methyl alpha-methylphenylethylamine.

To test bases, oils, acids, and reactions was interesting, but all those tests had grown boring before long. But the hallucinogens, the psychoactives, they were an experiment within himself. To watch a reaction was one thing, but to /feel/ it happen was a whole new level.
And it had been fun. Even alone, Crius had found himself enjoying every second of it.

Until his nineteenth birthday.

Until that night, Crius had never had a problem. But when the needle had gone in and the chemical had begun to take hold, things were different. Somehow he’d willed himself out of his room, and up and out of the dungeons. At several points in time the world had gone dark, only to come back into focus a while later.
After however long, he returned to himself and found his parents staring at him, as well as a myriad of guests. Jaeger had looked horrified, his eyes wide and his hands over his mouth. The others all looked the same, but it was his mother’s face that he looked into as he stood there, his clothing covered in stains, his eyes red, his nose and gums bleeding, his arms lined with track marks. He remembered the world tilting, and he remembered retching a long line of milky white vomit onto the carpets before pitching over.
It had been his mother’s scream that he’d heard last.

Crius pushed the hair from his face again.
He’d received his title that night, ‘La honte de St Clair’. The shame of St Clair. The rumors spread like wildfire. That he was inept. Possessed. A freak, a demon, a simpleton. That his parents kept him in the dungeons to keep him out of the public eye.
And that had driven Crius underground for good.

Nowadays, he left only to take the odd meal with his family, or for the rarer bath. Sometimes he’d visit Jaeger, and sometimes he’d visit his sister.
He owed his life to Apollo, and to Caroline. Both had pulled his sorry ass out from death’s door more times than he could count, and so he made a point of being clean when he did.

Those visits were becoming rarer too.

And now he had to sit through a good four hours of Matilde’s simpering questions. She played her part beautifully. Laughing at his answers, touching his hands and shoulders, smiling at him, the compliments..
They made him uncomfortable. He would fidget when touched, mutter his replies, and more often than not would stutter so badly every second or third word that his sentences were indiscernible.
She didn’t actually love him, it didn’t matter. If Matilde suffered him, it was for a title and a voice in court for her father. Nothing else.

The thought angered him.

No woman ever looked at him with a real smile.
Not even his sister. There was always pity in those eyes, or was it disgust? Sometimes he wasn’t sure.
Only Caroline. The automaton had told him countless times that his practices were unwise, but had never moved to stop him. She’d saved his life though, a dozen times, maybe more. And she was beautiful. With her large, turquoise eyes and a thick head of fine brown hair. She had a smile that could light the world, and never once had she sneered at him, called him La honte de St Clair, or laughed at him.

Renard called Caroline his sister, but there was no blood between them. The woman was a machine, crafted and constructed. She was dear to his heart, but not family. Not in the way his father saw her. Crius couldn’t look at her as a sister, the idea made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t desire a sister in the way he wanted Caroline.
It was a perverse thought, one he’d struggled with for years, though the ‘struggling’ was less now. Even the thought of her roused him, and he was often prone to moments of weakness in the dead of the night.

Despite the wants and the pinning, Crius had never moved to say anything. Nor would he, he thought. The automaton couldn’t rightly understand love, and he wasn’t even sure if she was … complete.

The thought alone was enough to bring a blush creeping up his neck. He might have humored the thought longer had a knock not sounded. Jumping a tad, the Gaullian prince turned to face the door, muttering:
“Y - yes?”

“Sire? Your guests are ready to receive you.”

“Yes. C - coming. Coming.” Crius stood and rolled his sleeves down, mumbling as he went:
“They’re n - not my guests.”