Another Year Older - Beyril's Apartment (MATURE) (Lani and Beyril)

"Hey," he said, arm winding around her waist and drawing her in for a kiss. "With both of us dating and anyone that would be staying in the spare room already well settled, we'll both be leaving the apartment at the end of the school year, anyway." He pressed a kiss to her forehead, tender, heartfelt, and lingering. "After that, we can look into a place together. Would you like that? You'll even get to decorate everything, and we can buy all new kitchen supplies."

Beyril blushed, smiling and tilting her head to kiss him back, "I would like that a lot. But we can talk more when I'm not running late." She kissed his fingers and slid on her shoes. "See you later, I love you!"

"And I love you, fenices. Be careful. Call me if you need anything!" It was unnecessary, he knew, but a habit that he still could not manage to break.

Beyril smiled and waved, exchanging a curt nod with the nude Akira in the kitchen on her way out.

ooc: I need a minute to get over that post. Please expand it so that I have something to work with other than my laughter. <3

Akira is naked in the kitchen making coffee for he and Savannah, with hickies from his neck... Downward.

ooc: I love our OC's far too much.

ic:

Tony's brow raised as he looked over at the man, shaking his head in submissive understanding as he made his way to the living room and set about tidying up what little mess remained. "She did quite a number on you this time, giant."

Akira shrugged, "I let her. I wasn't allowed to move. New experiment of hers." He mused, dropping in a spoon of sugar, "She's dressed, if you wanna say hi. I think she wanted to discuss something with you. I wasn't paying attention."

"She can be a bit distracting," Tony said off-handedly, moving around the man to grab a bagel, eating it raw as she headed back to their room. "Be back momentarily. Please put some pants on in case Rogue shows up."

Akira nodded, once again not paying attention as the coffee machine sputtered to brew.

Antonio rolled his eyes at the blatant display of confidence and general ignorance towards anyone else's opinions, reactions, or cares of the current state of affairs. Even still, he made his way back to the room in relative silence, fingers strumming at guitar strings that weren't even there. "Sayv?"

"Present," She called, lounging back on the bed, tablet in hand, hair tied begrudgingly back in an attempt to tame its newfound wildness. Mika had somehow wandered back into the room and was curled up at her side, nuzzling insistently.

"You wanted to-"

"Sit." The word was calm, clipped, and collected, but uttered like a command, and he found himself obeying without even quite realizing it, positioning himself at the end of the bed, staring at her quizzically. "What do you know of her past?" The younger woman asked, eyes still intently focused on the device before her, but picking up the sudden quickening of his pulse nonetheless.

"Besides the gang?"

"Yes."

Confusion perplexed his face as he stared at her, confused. Were there other skeletons he didn't know about, outside of the gang and drugs? "Only what she has said. Nothing of serious note. She mostly talks about her family."

"And what of her Academy years...?" Her eyes flickered up, then, staring him down for a brief moment, enough to catch the increased confusion before returning to whatever was apparently so intently intriguing on her electronic.

"Savannah, where is this going?"

Akira made his way back in, a small miracle that a blanket was now tied around his midsection, three cups of coffee in hand. He tucked one under his arm to hand another to Tony, "You ever take a psychology class?" He asked, almost as clipped as she had been, as though the two spoke telepathically this whole time. He handed another cup to Savannah and laid back behind her, waiting for direction while his coffee cooled.

"Not recently," Tony said simply, shrugging, knowing that she would explain eventually. Eventually.

"Have you noticed anything strange about her, intimately?"

"Will you stop asking questions and tell me what the fuck this is about?" The more they seemed to evade, the more it set him on edge, eyes narrowed, temper snarling at the back of his conscious.

Akira looked at Savannah, taking Beyril's journal from off the nightstand, "One of the teachers raped her."

There was a stunned silence that followed, a blank expression that very clearly seemed to shield an eruption behind the surface of his consciousness. Savannah pressed back against Akira just slightly, waiting for the temper to blow.

What came of it was a deadly calm.

"Who?"

Akira just nudged the book towards him, "You can let her tell you if you want."

Tony looked down at the book, staring at it, unsure. "She left it out?"

"Again, yes." Savannah said, watching him with a steady gaze, taking in his every reaction.

"May I.. take it elsewhere?"

Akira nodded, "Of course. Take as much time as you need."

Beyril Stone wrote:

"I wish I could bring myself to tell him everything. I love him so much. I love us so much. Every gentle touch and lingering embrace. I love sleeping with him, I love waking with him. But I hate that sometimes after he's fallen asleep, I cry for hours just wrapping his unconscious limbs around me. I like to imagine he'd say it's not my fault. That this is what he'd really do; just hug me and let me cry. Maybe he'd kiss my cheeks and play with my hair. But I'm just scared. I'm scared that the things I think late at night would become the things he says. That he'd say that I was really responsible for what Sylas did. That I asked for him to rape me. I couldn't stop it I swear. I tried so hard. I couldn't even scream though. I just want to scream...."

Knuckles turned white as rage began to boil over enough to tremble and shake his every nerve, altering the functionality of his mindset and desire, retargetting every bit of fury he had ever felt. Slowly, his eyes seemed to slit and redden, the silver in his hair beginning to deepen, and his body began to highlight in blue. Savannah reached a hand out to try to still the process, but the heat was radiating far more than she expected, and she was increasingly aware that they were out of sync.

Akira gave her a glance, stepping aside and putting on pants and a shirt, "Let's give him his space." he warned her, taking her hand and tugging her gently away, "If you need us, just call."

No form of sound managed to escape him, his body flickering between forms. He didn't seem to react in any way to their going.

----

ooc: I need a time skip

Strangely, the rest of the journal seemed to be mostly pure joy. She wrote often about love and peace and happiness. She wrote about how much it made her smile once when Tony had fallen asleep in the tub after a long day of work, so she drained the water and covered him with a towel and brought in a pillow since she couldn't lift him herself, and for a while, she rested her head on the edge of the tub to sleep there with him, but then worried about how silly he'd think she was if she stayed there.

Only every once in a while did she speak of fears or sadness, and those few moments were tinged with poignancy. Scribbled in the margins was the occasional verse of poetry, and once, during a depressive night where she wrote about nightmares of Sylas, she scribbled a verse that read, "I'm afraid my broken pieces will cut and bruise you one day/And you'll get so tired, you'll walk away./I could lose everything and let it go/but god, not you./Please god, not you."

She spoke of relief often, both coming from him, and Savannah, and Akira all three, once or twice from Mika. She'd sketch profiles of him sleeping late at night, an artistic and dreamlike quality in his own whispy hair draped like delicate lace interweaving with light while his face buried into a pillow, even when her own artistic ability faltered, the delicate compositions seemed to hold him in a place of reverence. She spoke in an entry about her sister, dead when she was an infant, and Beyril only 10.

"She'd be 10 herself now. Every time I see Tony and his great big glorious family I think about how he'd have loved her. I don't know a thing about her, but I love the very idea of her. The idea of Tony braiding her hair, though, and letting her paint his nails the way he does with his cousins and siblings.... Dad would have loved him. I like to think they love him anyways, wherever they are.

The whole morning passed in falters and flickers, like there were breaks in the sort of angry trance for only moments where the rest of her journal came through, and before he knew it, the front door clicked open and the warm sound of Beyril humming the verse of "Flightless Bird/American Mouth" echoed through the empty living room back to were he sat on Savannah's bed.

"Tony!" she called, "I'm home!"

By the time she had arrived, Savannah and Akira had managed to decorate the house, neon contrasting greatly with the usual bohemian theme. Savannah's face was lit like the forth of July, her eyes following her best friend. "I don't listen." She warned, but reality won out enough for her to gesture back towards Beyril's room. "Your man's in there."

Beyril's cheeks were pink enough to match the decor, but she smiled nonetheless and hugged Savannah tightly, "Thanks for the ones on the ceiling." She teased, Akira merely shrugging and rolling his eyes. Beyril glanced back to her room, "If he's naked, I'm coming back out." She joked but headed back to her room anyways, "Tony?" She called, "I'm home."

He looked up from the bed, eyes still skimming through the journal, an assortment of potted plants littering all previously available space on her night stand. Around the room were scattered tea light candles, flower petals, and an added assortment of crystals.

"Beyril," he said, eyes shining dimly in the low light, voice broken.