![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Church Source 2
There's no particularly need to worry about staying up for so late. For the church, he's nothing more than a tool, and tools are paid no mind until they need to be used. On days when there are no executions, he has nothing to do but sleep and wildly pace in a space much too small for a regular person of his size, let alone someone who's been groomed for such a high energy activity such as public execution spectacles. Meals come twice a day, never quite enough. Every bite he takes is just a reminder of the food Claude had given him, meat tart on his tongue , bread cracking under his teeth. It might not have seemed like much to him, but to Dimitri, it had been a rare bit of flavor. Something new after the same bland food that always has seemed like leftovers to the Intseh.
By the time Claude makes his way down to Dimitri's cage again, he's still well awake, and pacing for lack of anything else to do. He's so lost in his head that it takes a couple of rounds before his ears flick up sharply and his gaze follows quickly after. The surprise couldn't be more obvious on his face, his flicking tail being the only movement for a moment. "So you came," he says slowly, as if the point needed to be hammered in any further.
--
"Of course," Claude replies, planting his hands on his hips and standing with an air of casual gallantry that's obviously meant to be nothing more than an entertaining act. "You must've mistaken me for someone unreliable. Believe me, that's an easy mistake to make." He grins at Dimitri. "But I can't very well show you anything if you don't get to see me, can I?"
He drops the act for something at least more genuine, moving closer to the cage as he reaches into his pouch. "Hungry? I brought better food this time. I've gooooot..." He pulls out a packet of waxed paper. "Let's see...smoked sausages, some cheese, dried fruits...oh, and some fresh bread! Just baked this morning." He actually has to compress the paper a bit to slide his haul through the bars.
--
Very slowly, Dimitri is starting to realize that the some of the playfulness he remembers from his youth has only had a chance to grow into something that is, somehow, even More. Just. More. He's fairly certain that he'd be more faintly exasperated if this wasn't something so foreign to his day to day that it catches him a little off-guard, and thus not anywhere closer to the bars.
In that aspect, bringing more food was the best idea, because that's what ultimately draws Dimitri close once again. He stares at just how much there is, squeezed in past the bars, and nearly doesn't seem to know what to do with it once he has it. Quietly settling down against the floor, he tries to unwrap it and grimaces a little when his claws tear right through the wax paper easily. This might take a second; it's been a long time since he's had to handle anything with his claws like they are. "So you have enough money to waste on extra food like this..."
--
"Well, technically the church employs me. Not that I had a lot of other job options, growing up as their ward. But I make a decent living as a hunter who brings in food for them...and sometimes they use me as a scout, since I go everywhere and I'm good in the wilderness. Mostly it's just keeping the larders full, though." Claude sits down next to the cage, Indian style, watching Dimitri with quiet satisfaction. "But, if I'm being entirely honest, I might have lifted this stuff from the kitchen's personal stores without, ah, precisely asking. No point in troubling anyone over so little, right?"
Yeah, Claude absolutely stole this stuff. Specifically from the better quality food they set aside for higher-ranking people in the church, who get a better quality of food than the rank and file.
--
When he was younger, Dimitri might have protested at the revelation of casual food theft. When he'd been recently summoned, he hadn't quite understood what had happened- dazed from the sudden pull from his home to an entirely different place like this. A part of him had wanted to believe that it was a mistake of some sort, that the humans were being cautious of him because they didn't know what he was much like they were rather foreign to him. If he was friendly, and as courteous as one could be in another language, and stayed patient, whatever had happened would be cleared up. Perhaps even someone from his home island would come to retrieve him, somehow. They hadn't hurt him for the most part, and tended to him well, so, naive as a view as it was, he'd desperately clung to it for lack of anything else to do.
Right now, he clearly couldn't give less of a damn about something as petty as theft, and the only response is a dull dead stare from beneath his brow before he turns his attention back to clumsily shredding through the paper as much as he is unwrapping it. "If you continue to steal, they'll discover the culprit," he says, shaking some paper off of a claw. "Enough of it, and they may even send you to me." Petty crime was one thing. Repeated petty crime was another, which the Church had no patience for. If Dimitri knew the exact people Claude had stolen from, he'd say that such patience was even less. "Which I suppose is one way not have to deal with such sneaking you still seem fond of."
He pauses in his talking, finally having made it to the actual food part of this package, and his tail begins quickly flicking back and forth.
--
"Don't worry, I'll be careful," Claude says with a chuckle. "That...is concern you're showing, right?"
He rests his chin on his hand as he watches Dimitri. "Anyway, I don't think they're going to notice one person's worth of food missing, especially if it's not every day. Which it can't be, because as much as I might like to visit you every night, I won't always be able to. Sometimes there'll be events here that keep things too active for me to go unobserved, or I'll be sent out hunting or traveling and have to spend the night out in the wilds or in other towns...who knows. I'll visit as often as I can get away with, but I can't exactly promise a consistent schedule. We'll just have to roll with the situation as it is, and see where that takes us."
He leans back, lacing his hands behind his head now. "Anyway, I'd like to make your food myself, but I can't really get away with that. If I wanted to make you anything hot, I'd be cooking late at night and someone would be bound to notice and question the smell. And it's not like I have the skill set, or the tools, to just whip up things like bread and sausages and cheese over a campfire. Nope; the food I make myself is the stuff you've already had, and it's fine for traveling but I want to do better for you. The gods know you deserve it. So it's stealing or bust, really."
'Gods' is interesting. The religion of the order they work for is not a polytheistic one. But then Claude may have already mentioned as a child that his culture is very different from the church's.
--
"It's honesty," is the gruff reply, even as he leans over the food spread out before him. The smell alone is better than what he's had in a long time, and it'd almost be a shame to make it disappear with the actual act of eating if his stomach wasn't overruling that idea rather soundly. Rather, having a reason to actually choose where to start based on what he might actually like is what has him pause, whereas he'd be almost pragmatic in his regular meals.
While he chooses, his ears flick slightly, the only sign that he's otherwise listening to Claude go on. It's a lot of talk, masquerading as sense- that's what he wants to believe, at any rate. "Clearly what your gods think doesn't matter, because this is what I've earned," he says, lip curling faintly even as he finally picks up the bread. It's already much softer than what he tends to get while in captivity, and he takes a brief sniff before biting.
...It's hard not to show his pleasure at the taste, eyes narrowing a little bit while the flicking of his tail gives him away completely.
--
"Where you've ended up and what you've earned don't necessarily have any correlation to each other, you know," Claude says mildly, trying not to watch that twitching tail too obviously. How completely it gives Dimitri away, and how adorable Claude finds it, are things he's going to keep firmly to himself; he's almost certain Dimitri would consciously restrain himself otherwise, and that'd be a shame.
Claude will never understand people who encounter things that are new, or different, or unfamiliar, and react with fear and revulsion. (Which is, of course, the way the church does things.) When Claude encounters things like that, his first reaction has always been fascination. The insatiable desire to know more, to expand his knowledge and his horizons. He'd once felt very alone in that, growing up in the church...but since he's been able to travel, to meet new people and go outside the monastery's circle of influence, he's discovered that there's quite a mix of people with different approaches to things, and the church is an unsettlingly single-minded outlier. It's been both comforting and kind of alarming at the same time, realizing how fanatical they are while also recognizing that their fanaticism has a limited scope in the human experience.
"I wish I had small talk to make while you're eating," he says idly, folding his hands and resting his chin on them. "Obviously your mouth is busy. But I feel like it wouldn't exactly be appealing to listen to anything people have to say about the outside when you've been locked up all this time." Which kind of nixes the whole idea of 'catching up'. It's obvious what Dimitri's been doing all this time, and Claude suspects Dimitri has no interest in his story.
--
Swallowing his food, Dimitri levels his narrowed eye at Claude once more. "No," he says, the reverb of a growl carrying the word. "I don't." With that, he places the bread down and picks up some of the dried fruit next. Whatever Claude might think, after all, they're still both here, in the places the church has deigned they belong: Dimitri himself as a weapon for the condemned, Claude as another cog in the overall structure to a religion he doesn't even believe in.
...At least the dried fruit is good, and he closes his eye for a moment to enjoy the tart sweetness of it.
"You always talk too much," he says after just that brief second, breaking off a piece of cheese. "Always."
--
"I thought you might've missed having someone to talk to," Claude says, watching him. "Guess I thought wrong, huh?"
He seems like he might actually leave things there, too, staying quiet as Dimitri eats. But he doesn't leave.
--
Being watched while he eats doesn't seem to deter Dimitri very much. He just continues the same curious taste test for each bit of food, having a little bit of each to judge them on their own merits. If Claude really wants to- and may do if he's watching so much, if only for nothing else with conversation off the table for the time being- he may even be able to gauge Dimitri's rating of each bit of food depending on the activity of his tail. Everything is good, or at least better than what he usually gets, so there's always something... but some foods get more than others. The bread is on the relatively low end of the scale, just beneath the dried fruits. In contrast, the cheese and sausage gets high activity flicking at the very end of his tail that could almost be called wagging, if one wanted to.
Dimitri seems to be faintly aware of it, too, considering the whole tail tries to adjust itself a little bit more behind him. That doesn't seem to stop the actual movement.
With the tentative taste test done with, he properly digs in as if he thinks it might get stolen from him if he's not careful. Gone are the neater manners of his youth, tossed in along with the food. All that's left is a little bit of cheese and a bit of dried fruit, quite clearly placed to the side with a bit of purpose. With the meal done, the silence becomes all the more clear. Dimitri still doesn't see any reason to break it, eye refocusing on Claude's existence on the other side of the bars.
"What is it you're getting out of this?" he asks, voice a low mutter. Even right now, it's hard for him to grasp the idea that there's some good in the world, that a friend can just be a friend and that's enough.
--
"What, you don't think your winning personality and scintillating company are enough of a reward?" Claude blinks innocently at him for a moment before giving up and bursting into a chuckle. "Seriously, though, this isn't about getting something. We're friends, and that's enough. But I guess getting to be with my old friend is getting something, if it comes to that...no matter how suspicious and hostile you are. Knowing you're all right means a lot...for a given value of 'all right', obviously, but it's a big improvement for me over my having no idea what happened to you. Wondering if you were even alive."
Claude's expression has only grown more serious as he talks. "I missed you, you know. A lot. Being able to be with you again would be worth risking a lot, all by itself. But you've had a miserable time of it, too, for no good reason, so being able to do something - anything - to make that better is worth even more."
--
The teasing, the smiling, the glibness- it's all been so foreign to him that it had seemed better to think it fake because at least that would make sense. The change from laughing into seriousness.... That should be vindicating. Yet no mask has been pulled away, no lie has been revealed. Claude is still saying the same thing he's been saying ever since he returned to Dimitri's life: that they're friends, that he cares, that Dimitri deserves more than to be living tool to rid those the Church has tossed aside.
The idea that someone might have missed him, that his absence has ever been noticed is...
"You missed what I was," Dimitri says quietly, drawing one knee up to his chest and arm curling around it. "How did you find me?"
-
"No, I missed you," Claude replies. "Full stop. I'm not blind, Dimitri. I can see how you've changed. But I'm still here, aren't I? You might be different, but you're still you. Besides, the way you are now...it's not how you want to be, is it? It's not what's natural for you. It's what they've made you to be. What the situation's demanded you become. How could anyone blame you for that? How could anyone call that natural? If either of us find that distasteful, it's still not on you. And if it's rooted in the situation you're in...then it doesn't have to be permanent, either."
Not that Claude's going to linger on that subject long. It brushes up against things he's not prepared to discuss just yet, plans that are still on the drawing board.
"As for how I found you?" He laughs, suddenly, almost deliberately forcing the change of tone and subject. "Total accident. I told you, I was just passing through, and I guess I must have laid the charm on a little thick when I was dropping off the supplies I'd brought with the quartermaster, because he roped me into going to watch an execution. Not exactly my idea of a fun time, honestly, but he wouldn't hear any objections! And, well...I saw you there, obviously. I was pretty sure I recognized you, but I had to come see you up close to be sure. We didn't exactly have front row seats."
--
"It's what I am regardless!" He snarls out the words, claws digging lightly into his leg as he leans forward with his hackles raised. "Natural or not, wanted or not, there's no changing what I am now. You've seen what I can do- what I do regularly." Dimitri draws his lips back, exposing teeth as point and warning both. "I broke his neck in my teeth- I didn't have to. I don't have to do most of how I do my purpose, yet I still do it all. And you'll still hold onto that?"
Because it's not that he doesn't want Claude- the conversation or the warmth or just seeing him. It's that Dimitri can't see himself as something- not even a person, a thing- that deserves that kind of attention, even when he believes in its existence. He's almost not even sure he knows how to be a person anymore... how to reciprocate what Claude is offering to him.
--
"Yes," Claude replies, holding Dimitri's gaze levelly. "Even if that's what you are now, even if that's all you're ever going to be, I'm still going to hold onto that. I don't even know why you're asking, Dimitri. If I'd decided otherwise, if I hadn't already made up my mind that who and what you are now is worth whatever I can offer, would I have even come?"
--
"Because you SHOULDN'T!" In a whirl of movement, Dimitri is up on his feet again, towering over Claude with his fists trembling at his sides. "I can't- it's not-" With how long it's been since he's been able to talk to another- and not just a hallucination, but a real breathing person- Dimitri has done fairly well in still communicating as well as ever. Yet set off, words escape him, so instead he whirls about to resume pacing... Now quicker and more furious, trembling in too much energy he can't verbalize.
--
Claude, faced with this, simply laughs. Quietly - he doesn't dare be loud; perhaps people are used to Dimitri making a ruckus in his cage, but another person's voice would doubtless draw attention - but thoroughly. "I've got such a long history of doing things I shouldn't do, Dimitri, you have no idea." He grins at his pacing friend. "Including making friends with you in the first place. Being told I shouldn't do something just makes me want to do it more."
--
At least a half dozen more rounds of pacing have to be worked out before the restless energy ebbs away enough for Dimitri to remember how to form words. "Then I won't take responsibility for it." Just a hint of fang can be seen past his lips, and his tail is thrashing about like a whip behind him. "Whatever happens. I'm sure I'll see you with a diamond on your chest soon enough."
--
"I can think of worse ways to die," Claude replies, unperturbed. "But there's no reason my decisions would ever be your responsibility, is it? If the consequences for those decisions turn out to be you, then so be it." He grins. "But I'm a bit more sneaky than I used to be, you know. I think I can get away with this."
--
The way Dimitri sort of tilts his head, eye looking down on Claude, says without words that an execution would then be his responsibility in the first place and he thinks Claude is some form of idiot. Besides that, he doesn't waste breath or energy with a counter. "I suspect it's not as hard for other people to get here if they want," he growls, sweeping back down into a curled up state. Unlike the first night when their meeting started, it's not as far away as possible. "Most people do not lack sense."
--
As Claude already covered his bases by acknowledging that the consequences for his decisions would fall under Dimitri's purview, he's impervious to that look. "You really are worried about me, aren't you?" he says lazily.
--
"I'm stunned, if I am anything," Dimitri grumbles from his spot, still peering out from where his face is stuck against one arm. "I am not often in the position to see foolishness of this level."
--
"What's so foolish about it, anyway?" Claude asks, looking amused. He expects to get a full list, really.
--
"Would the details of such cause you to reconsider your actions?" Because Dimitri has re-known Claude for all of two nights, and he's already fairly sure nothing would except maybe immediate death.
--
"You know, I'd like to believe you're asking that because some part of you doesn't actually want to dissuade me from being your friend." Claude smiles, and there's a flicker of ruefulness in his eyes even if it never makes it into his voice or onto his face otherwise. "But let's face it, you've been doing nothing but that since we met again, and I'm too smart to believe lies I tell myself." He sits back, leaning on his hands and looking up at the sky. "But to answer the question...no, not really. I've already considered my actions plenty."
--
"I have a great deal of doubt on your alleged intelligence." From his position, all this looks like is some vague inclination towards the suicidal instead of the clever and sharp witted boy who'd make him laugh. Dimitri's tail gives a much smaller flick where it's sprawled out. "...So a night is all you need to consider your actions, then."
--
"It's all I need to decide where I'm going." Claude shrugs, still looking up at the sky. "As for the finer details of how exactly I'm going to get there, well, that tends to take a little longer. But I never claimed to have those all ironed out already, and I'm working on them as we speak."
--
Where he's going... Dimitri's gaze shifts a little ways, going distant. "Little wonder then, that I can't..." It's a half finished thought, forgotten to stay inside, with the Intseh not used to keeping quiet when often the only people to listen have been inside his own head.
--
"Hm?" Claude glances at him. "Can't what?"
---
There's apparently a slight delay between Dimitri's brain, his actions, and overall just reality in general right now. It takes a second for him to blink and look back over at Claude. "What?"
--
"You said it's not surprising you can't...something." Claude looks curious. "Can't what?"
--
"Ah... I said that aloud..." Dimitri doesn't seem particularly bothered by this particular moment of instability. It's happened more than enough times, after all. He merely shifts in place. "I can't understand your thinking. But I wouldn't. There's no need for me to think on where I'm going." His nose tucks into the crook of his elbow, voice muffled. "Perhaps, in that light, foolishness can almost make sense."
--
"I see." Claude studies Dimitri briefly, then scoots over to the bars, actually leaning sideways against them as he looks in at his friend. "So...you're resigned to being here forever, huh? You're on such a hair trigger, I was wondering if you give them trouble trying to get free."
--
"I won't be here forever." And before that can be mistaken for optimism- "I'll die." Dimitri shifts, slipping one arm under the other so that it can stretch out between them. "Until then, it doesn't matter if I lash out or not." Not with the brand that shows on fair fur, a dark and ugly mark designating him as executioner... and keeping him bound to the church.
Not that they need to send him off into a berserk state. Dimitri does that on his own more often than not. It's as much a problem as it makes executions easier.
--
"Well, by that logic, none of us will be here forever," Claude says, a touch dryly. "I meant that you're resigned to not getting out of here before that happens."
Claude's already laying his schemes, and he has plans for that mark of Dimitri's. But for now, he doesn't speak of them.
--
"It would never happen." On that matter, Dimitri seems almost blandly certain. It's a fact that doesn't even hurt, anymore, just a dull fact of life. If there's anything stings, it's something else, and he narrows his eye over at Claude. "I tried. I was younger, and tried. The most I'll be able to do is take out someone before they put me down like a wild animal... .I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into the throat of whatever high up I can get."
It's its own mild form of suicide. He's given up on escaping... so, for Dimitri, that only means taking someone down with him before he finds the only sort of release he can.
For now, he curls his arm back against himself, and his tail wraps around back to the front. "...Stay long enough. You'll see how it is during some execution or another." Sometimes, in the throes of his own wild berserk fury, he doesn't return back to his cage so easily, and his handlers need to work on dealing with that. These days, it's half the entertainment in executions.
--
Claude absorbs all of this without any particular comment; he's folding this information into his plans, into his understanding of the entire situation he's navigating, as carefully as egg whites in a souffle. It's upsetting to hear Dimitri talk like this, and Claude wants to reassure him, to rebut him - to tell him that he's not going to let it be like that. But until he has solid plans, no promises he can make will have substance. And in a mental state like Dimitri's, Claude can't afford to let anything fall through on him.
(Worse, if Dimitri just...talks out loud to himself without realizing like that, entrusting any secrets to him might be a bad plan anyway. Better to not risk accidentally compromising them.)
So instead, he approaches the subject obliquely, looking up at the stars again. "You know...I remember when we were kids, I always dreamed about busting us both out and running away with you somewhere. Back to my homeland, usually...as though it were just a few miles over." He chuckles quietly. "Man, the things I didn't know I didn't know back then...I didn't have any idea just what it'd take to make that happen."
But now I do.
--
"...You'd say that." Dimitri has looked out towards the stars hundreds of times in his time in captivity, bitter some nights, longing painfully others, because they were always a reminder of somewhere he'd never see again. Of people he'd never see again. Yet the view is changed utterly and completely with the single addition of Claude against his bars, soft moonlight illuminating his profile. The sight renews something in him, a nostalgic ache, and his claws twitch with the urge to reach out towards him again.
Dimitri slides his eye shut.
"I used to see you all the time... Like before. And there was always such promises. The number of times I fell for such a spectre..."
Finally, he gives in, one hand sneaking out to touch the very tip of Claude's clothing. Not a grasp, not a grab, not even a pinch. Simply a faint touch, enough to tell his mind that this isn't an illusion of his mind. It may be a lot of things, foolish most of all... But it's real.
--
"Did I promise you a lot of things as a kid?" Claude notes the barely-there touch, and it's keeping his smile up at the stars soft. "Or was that some hallucination of me? We talked about so many things back then, I don't remember all the specifics."
--
"The hallucinations." The pad of his finger rubs against the soft material that makes him Claude's clothing. "I tried to kill you, once."
Reassuring to hear, no doubt. Dimitri isn't helping with that low unchanging tones of his.
"You were always promising me things I couldn't have.... Asking questions all the time. And you were never changing..." Not like Dimitri was. Not like how he was always changing, locked away in this too small cage.
--
Claude has never been more proud of his own decision-making as he is right now, hearing how well-calculated his choice to not promise Dimitri anything he couldn't quickly and flawlessly deliver on actually was.
"Promising you things I didn't make happen...that doesn't sound like me." He glances sidelong at Dimitri. "Does that mean some ghost of me is what killed your hope?"
--
With his eye closed, Dimitri doesn't see how Claude looks to him again, or there'd be no doubt that he'd draw his hand back. Instead, there's just a low snort.
"Hope doesn't last in this place. Not this cage, not this church, not this entire damned city." They all spawned each other, after all. His hallucinations of Claude were just.... He's not sure what. Reassurance? Something to lash out at? Dimitri hasn't had time to really ponder it. It hadn't seemed to matter.
--
To Claude, it matters a great deal...not that he bothers to let on. He simply closes his own eyes. "Sorry for the pain I caused you...even if it was just a hallucination of me."
--
"If you apologize, you're acting as if it wasn't a hallucination at all." Dimitri finally pulls his hand back, if only to help himself shift to a slightly more comfortable position. His eye opens for a brief moment, just to take stock of where Claude is, before closing again. "....No rush this time, then?"
--
"I've gotten a feel for the guards' patrol routes already." Claude smiles to himself. He doesn't let the grass grow under his feet. "I've got another ten minutes or so before I should be gone."
--
That is fairly quick, and Dimitri almost doesn't want to give him credit for it. "Prepared well for more petty theft, then."
--
"Naturally! I'm hurt that you'd think me so incompetent, Dimitri~." Claude's voice is teasingly insincere.
--
"You saw me bite through bone and then shoved your hand into my cage with impressive careless disregard."
--
"I never said I wasn't reckless." Claude laughs. "Just not incompetent. They're different words for a reason, you know!"
He cocks an amused eyebrow at Dimitri. "You haven't complimented my Intsehli, by the way. But, you know, in your own time."
--
"The difference between them is less separated than one would think." In other words, he still thinks it was an asinine idea, even if it didn't turn out necessarily badly. When Claude brings up Intsehli, however, Dimitri actually glances away. It's been something he's been quietly trying not to think about, if he's been honest, because there's more questions than compliments on it.
But now that Claude has made it a subject of conversation... He can't ignore it so easily. "...Where did you learn it?"
--
"I've done a lot of traveling for my work, you know. Getting supplies and information...sometimes what the church wants isn't around here. And they don't like going too far from their circle of influence, either, because outside of this particular zealous offshoot, humans and Intseh co-existing peacefully together and recognizing each other as equals isn't all that uncommon." Claude smiles at Dimitri.
"So as soon as I first went to those places, found out where they were...I made it a point of interacting with Intseh as much as possible, learning as much as they'd teach me. Getting fluent at bartering with them." He laughs. "And believe me, if you've ever tried bartering in a second language, you'll find out just how fast you have to get good at it if you want a decent deal! Intseh are great, but merchants are merchants everywhere. They'll take you to the cleaners if they can get away with it." He winks. "So I learned fast. I taught you our language, so I wanted to learn yours." His smile fades a little. "Part of me would think about surprising you with it, if I ever found you again...but I guess another part of me never held out any real hope for that. But it was like, when I was learning, I could still pretend I believed you were alive."
--
While he hadn't asked for so much, almost against his will, Dimitri finds himself listening to it all regardless. It's not a surprise that Claude had jumped onto the first thing within the church that would allow him to go out of it, not with that insatiable curiosity that Dimitri can still remember from his childhood. For the boy who had snuck down into rooms away from the usual orphanage areas, had stayed to talk with a creature so foreign to him... As long as he could keep himself alive in a system that seemed hardly designed for that sort of thing, Dimitri supposes he can't say he's surprised at all.
It should just be as little a surprise that Claude kept a hold of the clumsy exchange of language, sharpened it into something so easy and quick on his tongue... Yet somehow, taking the time to properly digest it, Dimitri can't help being so either way. Or perhaps it's the reasoning behind it, with how much ill will he's thought of the other over these years, for lack of knowing what else he could possibly do.
Either way... He almost feels sick, somehow, and Dimitri keeps his gaze firmly away. "....I can't say the same." He understands enough of the human language- at least, the human language of this place- to make out what his jailers are saying regularly... but his own use, his full understanding? To say it's rusty is putting it lightly.
--
"That's fine. It's been a long time since anyone's taught you anything, right?" Claude smiles at him. "Maybe we could take up the lessons again. You don't have to if you don't want to, but it'd be something to do. Besides, you'd be able to insult the jailers in words they understand!"
--
"If past experiences are any indication, they'll only think me being up to tricks." His tail swishes sharply to the side, almost a snap in its quickness. "It would only be a waste of your time."
--
"I don't think so." Claude shrugs easily. "Time spent with you doesn't feel wasted, no matter what I'm doing. How could teaching you things feel wasteful?"
--
The answer feels so obvious that actually giving it makes his claws knead into his palms in quiet aggravation. "...It wouldn't be put to use. There's no reason for it to be." The unsaid insinuation laced between the words is And you should know that.
--
"Even if it isn't, so what? Teaching you something you want to know still has value. And unless you wanted to learn, there'd be no point in teaching you, so that's the only way it'd happen, right?" Claude tilts his head back to look up at the sky. "It wouldn't be a waste. Besides, you never know what tomorrow might bring."
--
"....It's been easy to know for years now." Whether he accepted it at the start, well, that was different. Dimitri isn't thinking of that, however. Instead, he's still staring at nothing, claws moving almost rhythmically to even more nothing. Does he want to learn? In ways he can't understand, it feels like a mistake, somehow. He feels like a mistake.
At the same time, there's so little to do in his cage.... It still feels as though it will hurt something, but the mind numbing lack of anything to do only stands out in even starker contrast now that Claude visits him so much.
"...The guards are going to come around soon, are they not?"
--
"Shit - yeah, you're right." Claude snaps from relaxed to harried in a heartbeat, jerking up from his sitting position and brushing himself off. "I'll be back the next night I can, all right? I don't know which night it'll be out of the next three, but I'll be here. Don't get yourself in too much trouble before then, all right? I want you to still be here when I come back."
And, without taking the time to wait for an answer, he quickly trots off. He pushed his luck a little, getting too comfortable, and he's not going to risk that backfiring on him.
--
That's quite something to hear from the guy who's stealing food from church pantries and shoving his hands into the cages of something that can tear off his arm with little effort. In contrast, Dimitri is fairly certain that he'd need to really act out if he wanted to do anything in the limited space he has. All he does is stay quiet, watching Claude disappear again. From his curled up spot, he forces his eye shut again. Whatever thoughts he might have otherwise had, he tries to smother them. Foolish ideas that he might be considering, he should at least take a day to actually think them over.
By the time Claude makes his way down to Dimitri's cage again, he's still well awake, and pacing for lack of anything else to do. He's so lost in his head that it takes a couple of rounds before his ears flick up sharply and his gaze follows quickly after. The surprise couldn't be more obvious on his face, his flicking tail being the only movement for a moment. "So you came," he says slowly, as if the point needed to be hammered in any further.
--
"Of course," Claude replies, planting his hands on his hips and standing with an air of casual gallantry that's obviously meant to be nothing more than an entertaining act. "You must've mistaken me for someone unreliable. Believe me, that's an easy mistake to make." He grins at Dimitri. "But I can't very well show you anything if you don't get to see me, can I?"
He drops the act for something at least more genuine, moving closer to the cage as he reaches into his pouch. "Hungry? I brought better food this time. I've gooooot..." He pulls out a packet of waxed paper. "Let's see...smoked sausages, some cheese, dried fruits...oh, and some fresh bread! Just baked this morning." He actually has to compress the paper a bit to slide his haul through the bars.
--
Very slowly, Dimitri is starting to realize that the some of the playfulness he remembers from his youth has only had a chance to grow into something that is, somehow, even More. Just. More. He's fairly certain that he'd be more faintly exasperated if this wasn't something so foreign to his day to day that it catches him a little off-guard, and thus not anywhere closer to the bars.
In that aspect, bringing more food was the best idea, because that's what ultimately draws Dimitri close once again. He stares at just how much there is, squeezed in past the bars, and nearly doesn't seem to know what to do with it once he has it. Quietly settling down against the floor, he tries to unwrap it and grimaces a little when his claws tear right through the wax paper easily. This might take a second; it's been a long time since he's had to handle anything with his claws like they are. "So you have enough money to waste on extra food like this..."
--
"Well, technically the church employs me. Not that I had a lot of other job options, growing up as their ward. But I make a decent living as a hunter who brings in food for them...and sometimes they use me as a scout, since I go everywhere and I'm good in the wilderness. Mostly it's just keeping the larders full, though." Claude sits down next to the cage, Indian style, watching Dimitri with quiet satisfaction. "But, if I'm being entirely honest, I might have lifted this stuff from the kitchen's personal stores without, ah, precisely asking. No point in troubling anyone over so little, right?"
Yeah, Claude absolutely stole this stuff. Specifically from the better quality food they set aside for higher-ranking people in the church, who get a better quality of food than the rank and file.
--
When he was younger, Dimitri might have protested at the revelation of casual food theft. When he'd been recently summoned, he hadn't quite understood what had happened- dazed from the sudden pull from his home to an entirely different place like this. A part of him had wanted to believe that it was a mistake of some sort, that the humans were being cautious of him because they didn't know what he was much like they were rather foreign to him. If he was friendly, and as courteous as one could be in another language, and stayed patient, whatever had happened would be cleared up. Perhaps even someone from his home island would come to retrieve him, somehow. They hadn't hurt him for the most part, and tended to him well, so, naive as a view as it was, he'd desperately clung to it for lack of anything else to do.
Right now, he clearly couldn't give less of a damn about something as petty as theft, and the only response is a dull dead stare from beneath his brow before he turns his attention back to clumsily shredding through the paper as much as he is unwrapping it. "If you continue to steal, they'll discover the culprit," he says, shaking some paper off of a claw. "Enough of it, and they may even send you to me." Petty crime was one thing. Repeated petty crime was another, which the Church had no patience for. If Dimitri knew the exact people Claude had stolen from, he'd say that such patience was even less. "Which I suppose is one way not have to deal with such sneaking you still seem fond of."
He pauses in his talking, finally having made it to the actual food part of this package, and his tail begins quickly flicking back and forth.
--
"Don't worry, I'll be careful," Claude says with a chuckle. "That...is concern you're showing, right?"
He rests his chin on his hand as he watches Dimitri. "Anyway, I don't think they're going to notice one person's worth of food missing, especially if it's not every day. Which it can't be, because as much as I might like to visit you every night, I won't always be able to. Sometimes there'll be events here that keep things too active for me to go unobserved, or I'll be sent out hunting or traveling and have to spend the night out in the wilds or in other towns...who knows. I'll visit as often as I can get away with, but I can't exactly promise a consistent schedule. We'll just have to roll with the situation as it is, and see where that takes us."
He leans back, lacing his hands behind his head now. "Anyway, I'd like to make your food myself, but I can't really get away with that. If I wanted to make you anything hot, I'd be cooking late at night and someone would be bound to notice and question the smell. And it's not like I have the skill set, or the tools, to just whip up things like bread and sausages and cheese over a campfire. Nope; the food I make myself is the stuff you've already had, and it's fine for traveling but I want to do better for you. The gods know you deserve it. So it's stealing or bust, really."
'Gods' is interesting. The religion of the order they work for is not a polytheistic one. But then Claude may have already mentioned as a child that his culture is very different from the church's.
--
"It's honesty," is the gruff reply, even as he leans over the food spread out before him. The smell alone is better than what he's had in a long time, and it'd almost be a shame to make it disappear with the actual act of eating if his stomach wasn't overruling that idea rather soundly. Rather, having a reason to actually choose where to start based on what he might actually like is what has him pause, whereas he'd be almost pragmatic in his regular meals.
While he chooses, his ears flick slightly, the only sign that he's otherwise listening to Claude go on. It's a lot of talk, masquerading as sense- that's what he wants to believe, at any rate. "Clearly what your gods think doesn't matter, because this is what I've earned," he says, lip curling faintly even as he finally picks up the bread. It's already much softer than what he tends to get while in captivity, and he takes a brief sniff before biting.
...It's hard not to show his pleasure at the taste, eyes narrowing a little bit while the flicking of his tail gives him away completely.
--
"Where you've ended up and what you've earned don't necessarily have any correlation to each other, you know," Claude says mildly, trying not to watch that twitching tail too obviously. How completely it gives Dimitri away, and how adorable Claude finds it, are things he's going to keep firmly to himself; he's almost certain Dimitri would consciously restrain himself otherwise, and that'd be a shame.
Claude will never understand people who encounter things that are new, or different, or unfamiliar, and react with fear and revulsion. (Which is, of course, the way the church does things.) When Claude encounters things like that, his first reaction has always been fascination. The insatiable desire to know more, to expand his knowledge and his horizons. He'd once felt very alone in that, growing up in the church...but since he's been able to travel, to meet new people and go outside the monastery's circle of influence, he's discovered that there's quite a mix of people with different approaches to things, and the church is an unsettlingly single-minded outlier. It's been both comforting and kind of alarming at the same time, realizing how fanatical they are while also recognizing that their fanaticism has a limited scope in the human experience.
"I wish I had small talk to make while you're eating," he says idly, folding his hands and resting his chin on them. "Obviously your mouth is busy. But I feel like it wouldn't exactly be appealing to listen to anything people have to say about the outside when you've been locked up all this time." Which kind of nixes the whole idea of 'catching up'. It's obvious what Dimitri's been doing all this time, and Claude suspects Dimitri has no interest in his story.
--
Swallowing his food, Dimitri levels his narrowed eye at Claude once more. "No," he says, the reverb of a growl carrying the word. "I don't." With that, he places the bread down and picks up some of the dried fruit next. Whatever Claude might think, after all, they're still both here, in the places the church has deigned they belong: Dimitri himself as a weapon for the condemned, Claude as another cog in the overall structure to a religion he doesn't even believe in.
...At least the dried fruit is good, and he closes his eye for a moment to enjoy the tart sweetness of it.
"You always talk too much," he says after just that brief second, breaking off a piece of cheese. "Always."
--
"I thought you might've missed having someone to talk to," Claude says, watching him. "Guess I thought wrong, huh?"
He seems like he might actually leave things there, too, staying quiet as Dimitri eats. But he doesn't leave.
--
Being watched while he eats doesn't seem to deter Dimitri very much. He just continues the same curious taste test for each bit of food, having a little bit of each to judge them on their own merits. If Claude really wants to- and may do if he's watching so much, if only for nothing else with conversation off the table for the time being- he may even be able to gauge Dimitri's rating of each bit of food depending on the activity of his tail. Everything is good, or at least better than what he usually gets, so there's always something... but some foods get more than others. The bread is on the relatively low end of the scale, just beneath the dried fruits. In contrast, the cheese and sausage gets high activity flicking at the very end of his tail that could almost be called wagging, if one wanted to.
Dimitri seems to be faintly aware of it, too, considering the whole tail tries to adjust itself a little bit more behind him. That doesn't seem to stop the actual movement.
With the tentative taste test done with, he properly digs in as if he thinks it might get stolen from him if he's not careful. Gone are the neater manners of his youth, tossed in along with the food. All that's left is a little bit of cheese and a bit of dried fruit, quite clearly placed to the side with a bit of purpose. With the meal done, the silence becomes all the more clear. Dimitri still doesn't see any reason to break it, eye refocusing on Claude's existence on the other side of the bars.
"What is it you're getting out of this?" he asks, voice a low mutter. Even right now, it's hard for him to grasp the idea that there's some good in the world, that a friend can just be a friend and that's enough.
--
"What, you don't think your winning personality and scintillating company are enough of a reward?" Claude blinks innocently at him for a moment before giving up and bursting into a chuckle. "Seriously, though, this isn't about getting something. We're friends, and that's enough. But I guess getting to be with my old friend is getting something, if it comes to that...no matter how suspicious and hostile you are. Knowing you're all right means a lot...for a given value of 'all right', obviously, but it's a big improvement for me over my having no idea what happened to you. Wondering if you were even alive."
Claude's expression has only grown more serious as he talks. "I missed you, you know. A lot. Being able to be with you again would be worth risking a lot, all by itself. But you've had a miserable time of it, too, for no good reason, so being able to do something - anything - to make that better is worth even more."
--
The teasing, the smiling, the glibness- it's all been so foreign to him that it had seemed better to think it fake because at least that would make sense. The change from laughing into seriousness.... That should be vindicating. Yet no mask has been pulled away, no lie has been revealed. Claude is still saying the same thing he's been saying ever since he returned to Dimitri's life: that they're friends, that he cares, that Dimitri deserves more than to be living tool to rid those the Church has tossed aside.
The idea that someone might have missed him, that his absence has ever been noticed is...
"You missed what I was," Dimitri says quietly, drawing one knee up to his chest and arm curling around it. "How did you find me?"
-
"No, I missed you," Claude replies. "Full stop. I'm not blind, Dimitri. I can see how you've changed. But I'm still here, aren't I? You might be different, but you're still you. Besides, the way you are now...it's not how you want to be, is it? It's not what's natural for you. It's what they've made you to be. What the situation's demanded you become. How could anyone blame you for that? How could anyone call that natural? If either of us find that distasteful, it's still not on you. And if it's rooted in the situation you're in...then it doesn't have to be permanent, either."
Not that Claude's going to linger on that subject long. It brushes up against things he's not prepared to discuss just yet, plans that are still on the drawing board.
"As for how I found you?" He laughs, suddenly, almost deliberately forcing the change of tone and subject. "Total accident. I told you, I was just passing through, and I guess I must have laid the charm on a little thick when I was dropping off the supplies I'd brought with the quartermaster, because he roped me into going to watch an execution. Not exactly my idea of a fun time, honestly, but he wouldn't hear any objections! And, well...I saw you there, obviously. I was pretty sure I recognized you, but I had to come see you up close to be sure. We didn't exactly have front row seats."
--
"It's what I am regardless!" He snarls out the words, claws digging lightly into his leg as he leans forward with his hackles raised. "Natural or not, wanted or not, there's no changing what I am now. You've seen what I can do- what I do regularly." Dimitri draws his lips back, exposing teeth as point and warning both. "I broke his neck in my teeth- I didn't have to. I don't have to do most of how I do my purpose, yet I still do it all. And you'll still hold onto that?"
Because it's not that he doesn't want Claude- the conversation or the warmth or just seeing him. It's that Dimitri can't see himself as something- not even a person, a thing- that deserves that kind of attention, even when he believes in its existence. He's almost not even sure he knows how to be a person anymore... how to reciprocate what Claude is offering to him.
--
"Yes," Claude replies, holding Dimitri's gaze levelly. "Even if that's what you are now, even if that's all you're ever going to be, I'm still going to hold onto that. I don't even know why you're asking, Dimitri. If I'd decided otherwise, if I hadn't already made up my mind that who and what you are now is worth whatever I can offer, would I have even come?"
--
"Because you SHOULDN'T!" In a whirl of movement, Dimitri is up on his feet again, towering over Claude with his fists trembling at his sides. "I can't- it's not-" With how long it's been since he's been able to talk to another- and not just a hallucination, but a real breathing person- Dimitri has done fairly well in still communicating as well as ever. Yet set off, words escape him, so instead he whirls about to resume pacing... Now quicker and more furious, trembling in too much energy he can't verbalize.
--
Claude, faced with this, simply laughs. Quietly - he doesn't dare be loud; perhaps people are used to Dimitri making a ruckus in his cage, but another person's voice would doubtless draw attention - but thoroughly. "I've got such a long history of doing things I shouldn't do, Dimitri, you have no idea." He grins at his pacing friend. "Including making friends with you in the first place. Being told I shouldn't do something just makes me want to do it more."
--
At least a half dozen more rounds of pacing have to be worked out before the restless energy ebbs away enough for Dimitri to remember how to form words. "Then I won't take responsibility for it." Just a hint of fang can be seen past his lips, and his tail is thrashing about like a whip behind him. "Whatever happens. I'm sure I'll see you with a diamond on your chest soon enough."
--
"I can think of worse ways to die," Claude replies, unperturbed. "But there's no reason my decisions would ever be your responsibility, is it? If the consequences for those decisions turn out to be you, then so be it." He grins. "But I'm a bit more sneaky than I used to be, you know. I think I can get away with this."
--
The way Dimitri sort of tilts his head, eye looking down on Claude, says without words that an execution would then be his responsibility in the first place and he thinks Claude is some form of idiot. Besides that, he doesn't waste breath or energy with a counter. "I suspect it's not as hard for other people to get here if they want," he growls, sweeping back down into a curled up state. Unlike the first night when their meeting started, it's not as far away as possible. "Most people do not lack sense."
--
As Claude already covered his bases by acknowledging that the consequences for his decisions would fall under Dimitri's purview, he's impervious to that look. "You really are worried about me, aren't you?" he says lazily.
--
"I'm stunned, if I am anything," Dimitri grumbles from his spot, still peering out from where his face is stuck against one arm. "I am not often in the position to see foolishness of this level."
--
"What's so foolish about it, anyway?" Claude asks, looking amused. He expects to get a full list, really.
--
"Would the details of such cause you to reconsider your actions?" Because Dimitri has re-known Claude for all of two nights, and he's already fairly sure nothing would except maybe immediate death.
--
"You know, I'd like to believe you're asking that because some part of you doesn't actually want to dissuade me from being your friend." Claude smiles, and there's a flicker of ruefulness in his eyes even if it never makes it into his voice or onto his face otherwise. "But let's face it, you've been doing nothing but that since we met again, and I'm too smart to believe lies I tell myself." He sits back, leaning on his hands and looking up at the sky. "But to answer the question...no, not really. I've already considered my actions plenty."
--
"I have a great deal of doubt on your alleged intelligence." From his position, all this looks like is some vague inclination towards the suicidal instead of the clever and sharp witted boy who'd make him laugh. Dimitri's tail gives a much smaller flick where it's sprawled out. "...So a night is all you need to consider your actions, then."
--
"It's all I need to decide where I'm going." Claude shrugs, still looking up at the sky. "As for the finer details of how exactly I'm going to get there, well, that tends to take a little longer. But I never claimed to have those all ironed out already, and I'm working on them as we speak."
--
Where he's going... Dimitri's gaze shifts a little ways, going distant. "Little wonder then, that I can't..." It's a half finished thought, forgotten to stay inside, with the Intseh not used to keeping quiet when often the only people to listen have been inside his own head.
--
"Hm?" Claude glances at him. "Can't what?"
---
There's apparently a slight delay between Dimitri's brain, his actions, and overall just reality in general right now. It takes a second for him to blink and look back over at Claude. "What?"
--
"You said it's not surprising you can't...something." Claude looks curious. "Can't what?"
--
"Ah... I said that aloud..." Dimitri doesn't seem particularly bothered by this particular moment of instability. It's happened more than enough times, after all. He merely shifts in place. "I can't understand your thinking. But I wouldn't. There's no need for me to think on where I'm going." His nose tucks into the crook of his elbow, voice muffled. "Perhaps, in that light, foolishness can almost make sense."
--
"I see." Claude studies Dimitri briefly, then scoots over to the bars, actually leaning sideways against them as he looks in at his friend. "So...you're resigned to being here forever, huh? You're on such a hair trigger, I was wondering if you give them trouble trying to get free."
--
"I won't be here forever." And before that can be mistaken for optimism- "I'll die." Dimitri shifts, slipping one arm under the other so that it can stretch out between them. "Until then, it doesn't matter if I lash out or not." Not with the brand that shows on fair fur, a dark and ugly mark designating him as executioner... and keeping him bound to the church.
Not that they need to send him off into a berserk state. Dimitri does that on his own more often than not. It's as much a problem as it makes executions easier.
--
"Well, by that logic, none of us will be here forever," Claude says, a touch dryly. "I meant that you're resigned to not getting out of here before that happens."
Claude's already laying his schemes, and he has plans for that mark of Dimitri's. But for now, he doesn't speak of them.
--
"It would never happen." On that matter, Dimitri seems almost blandly certain. It's a fact that doesn't even hurt, anymore, just a dull fact of life. If there's anything stings, it's something else, and he narrows his eye over at Claude. "I tried. I was younger, and tried. The most I'll be able to do is take out someone before they put me down like a wild animal... .I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into the throat of whatever high up I can get."
It's its own mild form of suicide. He's given up on escaping... so, for Dimitri, that only means taking someone down with him before he finds the only sort of release he can.
For now, he curls his arm back against himself, and his tail wraps around back to the front. "...Stay long enough. You'll see how it is during some execution or another." Sometimes, in the throes of his own wild berserk fury, he doesn't return back to his cage so easily, and his handlers need to work on dealing with that. These days, it's half the entertainment in executions.
--
Claude absorbs all of this without any particular comment; he's folding this information into his plans, into his understanding of the entire situation he's navigating, as carefully as egg whites in a souffle. It's upsetting to hear Dimitri talk like this, and Claude wants to reassure him, to rebut him - to tell him that he's not going to let it be like that. But until he has solid plans, no promises he can make will have substance. And in a mental state like Dimitri's, Claude can't afford to let anything fall through on him.
(Worse, if Dimitri just...talks out loud to himself without realizing like that, entrusting any secrets to him might be a bad plan anyway. Better to not risk accidentally compromising them.)
So instead, he approaches the subject obliquely, looking up at the stars again. "You know...I remember when we were kids, I always dreamed about busting us both out and running away with you somewhere. Back to my homeland, usually...as though it were just a few miles over." He chuckles quietly. "Man, the things I didn't know I didn't know back then...I didn't have any idea just what it'd take to make that happen."
But now I do.
--
"...You'd say that." Dimitri has looked out towards the stars hundreds of times in his time in captivity, bitter some nights, longing painfully others, because they were always a reminder of somewhere he'd never see again. Of people he'd never see again. Yet the view is changed utterly and completely with the single addition of Claude against his bars, soft moonlight illuminating his profile. The sight renews something in him, a nostalgic ache, and his claws twitch with the urge to reach out towards him again.
Dimitri slides his eye shut.
"I used to see you all the time... Like before. And there was always such promises. The number of times I fell for such a spectre..."
Finally, he gives in, one hand sneaking out to touch the very tip of Claude's clothing. Not a grasp, not a grab, not even a pinch. Simply a faint touch, enough to tell his mind that this isn't an illusion of his mind. It may be a lot of things, foolish most of all... But it's real.
--
"Did I promise you a lot of things as a kid?" Claude notes the barely-there touch, and it's keeping his smile up at the stars soft. "Or was that some hallucination of me? We talked about so many things back then, I don't remember all the specifics."
--
"The hallucinations." The pad of his finger rubs against the soft material that makes him Claude's clothing. "I tried to kill you, once."
Reassuring to hear, no doubt. Dimitri isn't helping with that low unchanging tones of his.
"You were always promising me things I couldn't have.... Asking questions all the time. And you were never changing..." Not like Dimitri was. Not like how he was always changing, locked away in this too small cage.
--
Claude has never been more proud of his own decision-making as he is right now, hearing how well-calculated his choice to not promise Dimitri anything he couldn't quickly and flawlessly deliver on actually was.
"Promising you things I didn't make happen...that doesn't sound like me." He glances sidelong at Dimitri. "Does that mean some ghost of me is what killed your hope?"
--
With his eye closed, Dimitri doesn't see how Claude looks to him again, or there'd be no doubt that he'd draw his hand back. Instead, there's just a low snort.
"Hope doesn't last in this place. Not this cage, not this church, not this entire damned city." They all spawned each other, after all. His hallucinations of Claude were just.... He's not sure what. Reassurance? Something to lash out at? Dimitri hasn't had time to really ponder it. It hadn't seemed to matter.
--
To Claude, it matters a great deal...not that he bothers to let on. He simply closes his own eyes. "Sorry for the pain I caused you...even if it was just a hallucination of me."
--
"If you apologize, you're acting as if it wasn't a hallucination at all." Dimitri finally pulls his hand back, if only to help himself shift to a slightly more comfortable position. His eye opens for a brief moment, just to take stock of where Claude is, before closing again. "....No rush this time, then?"
--
"I've gotten a feel for the guards' patrol routes already." Claude smiles to himself. He doesn't let the grass grow under his feet. "I've got another ten minutes or so before I should be gone."
--
That is fairly quick, and Dimitri almost doesn't want to give him credit for it. "Prepared well for more petty theft, then."
--
"Naturally! I'm hurt that you'd think me so incompetent, Dimitri~." Claude's voice is teasingly insincere.
--
"You saw me bite through bone and then shoved your hand into my cage with impressive careless disregard."
--
"I never said I wasn't reckless." Claude laughs. "Just not incompetent. They're different words for a reason, you know!"
He cocks an amused eyebrow at Dimitri. "You haven't complimented my Intsehli, by the way. But, you know, in your own time."
--
"The difference between them is less separated than one would think." In other words, he still thinks it was an asinine idea, even if it didn't turn out necessarily badly. When Claude brings up Intsehli, however, Dimitri actually glances away. It's been something he's been quietly trying not to think about, if he's been honest, because there's more questions than compliments on it.
But now that Claude has made it a subject of conversation... He can't ignore it so easily. "...Where did you learn it?"
--
"I've done a lot of traveling for my work, you know. Getting supplies and information...sometimes what the church wants isn't around here. And they don't like going too far from their circle of influence, either, because outside of this particular zealous offshoot, humans and Intseh co-existing peacefully together and recognizing each other as equals isn't all that uncommon." Claude smiles at Dimitri.
"So as soon as I first went to those places, found out where they were...I made it a point of interacting with Intseh as much as possible, learning as much as they'd teach me. Getting fluent at bartering with them." He laughs. "And believe me, if you've ever tried bartering in a second language, you'll find out just how fast you have to get good at it if you want a decent deal! Intseh are great, but merchants are merchants everywhere. They'll take you to the cleaners if they can get away with it." He winks. "So I learned fast. I taught you our language, so I wanted to learn yours." His smile fades a little. "Part of me would think about surprising you with it, if I ever found you again...but I guess another part of me never held out any real hope for that. But it was like, when I was learning, I could still pretend I believed you were alive."
--
While he hadn't asked for so much, almost against his will, Dimitri finds himself listening to it all regardless. It's not a surprise that Claude had jumped onto the first thing within the church that would allow him to go out of it, not with that insatiable curiosity that Dimitri can still remember from his childhood. For the boy who had snuck down into rooms away from the usual orphanage areas, had stayed to talk with a creature so foreign to him... As long as he could keep himself alive in a system that seemed hardly designed for that sort of thing, Dimitri supposes he can't say he's surprised at all.
It should just be as little a surprise that Claude kept a hold of the clumsy exchange of language, sharpened it into something so easy and quick on his tongue... Yet somehow, taking the time to properly digest it, Dimitri can't help being so either way. Or perhaps it's the reasoning behind it, with how much ill will he's thought of the other over these years, for lack of knowing what else he could possibly do.
Either way... He almost feels sick, somehow, and Dimitri keeps his gaze firmly away. "....I can't say the same." He understands enough of the human language- at least, the human language of this place- to make out what his jailers are saying regularly... but his own use, his full understanding? To say it's rusty is putting it lightly.
--
"That's fine. It's been a long time since anyone's taught you anything, right?" Claude smiles at him. "Maybe we could take up the lessons again. You don't have to if you don't want to, but it'd be something to do. Besides, you'd be able to insult the jailers in words they understand!"
--
"If past experiences are any indication, they'll only think me being up to tricks." His tail swishes sharply to the side, almost a snap in its quickness. "It would only be a waste of your time."
--
"I don't think so." Claude shrugs easily. "Time spent with you doesn't feel wasted, no matter what I'm doing. How could teaching you things feel wasteful?"
--
The answer feels so obvious that actually giving it makes his claws knead into his palms in quiet aggravation. "...It wouldn't be put to use. There's no reason for it to be." The unsaid insinuation laced between the words is And you should know that.
--
"Even if it isn't, so what? Teaching you something you want to know still has value. And unless you wanted to learn, there'd be no point in teaching you, so that's the only way it'd happen, right?" Claude tilts his head back to look up at the sky. "It wouldn't be a waste. Besides, you never know what tomorrow might bring."
--
"....It's been easy to know for years now." Whether he accepted it at the start, well, that was different. Dimitri isn't thinking of that, however. Instead, he's still staring at nothing, claws moving almost rhythmically to even more nothing. Does he want to learn? In ways he can't understand, it feels like a mistake, somehow. He feels like a mistake.
At the same time, there's so little to do in his cage.... It still feels as though it will hurt something, but the mind numbing lack of anything to do only stands out in even starker contrast now that Claude visits him so much.
"...The guards are going to come around soon, are they not?"
--
"Shit - yeah, you're right." Claude snaps from relaxed to harried in a heartbeat, jerking up from his sitting position and brushing himself off. "I'll be back the next night I can, all right? I don't know which night it'll be out of the next three, but I'll be here. Don't get yourself in too much trouble before then, all right? I want you to still be here when I come back."
And, without taking the time to wait for an answer, he quickly trots off. He pushed his luck a little, getting too comfortable, and he's not going to risk that backfiring on him.
--
That's quite something to hear from the guy who's stealing food from church pantries and shoving his hands into the cages of something that can tear off his arm with little effort. In contrast, Dimitri is fairly certain that he'd need to really act out if he wanted to do anything in the limited space he has. All he does is stay quiet, watching Claude disappear again. From his curled up spot, he forces his eye shut again. Whatever thoughts he might have otherwise had, he tries to smother them. Foolish ideas that he might be considering, he should at least take a day to actually think them over.