[The burst of melancholy is met with a little electric charge of anxiety; it's undirected, in this case. Formless, shapeless. But there's still a weight to it, serrated teeth in its edges.]
Caring enough to try to earn the ending you want means opening yourself up to the possibility of failing.
[It means scraping your ass off the pavement of a bar and fighting alongside your kids in Atlas despite the impossible odds, seemingly finding a path to the next chapter and watching it all fall to ruin before you.
There is a good reason they chose to walk away from Remnant, as the dream crumbled.]
[That's a loaded statement, and Break is silent in the face of it for several moments. It's a desperation he's known intimately several times over. He cared enough to hurl himself straight into hell for the ending he wanted, once, and didn't get it. Then he signed on to his own ending without realizing he'd care about completely different things by the time he actually arrived there, and most of the few acceptable parts of it that were left were torn from his hands, too. About the only thing he can still say with any pride is that he did what only he was able to do back then, and while that certainly isn't anything small in the midst of the larger story, most days it's overshadowed by the bloody shrapnel he flung into his dearest people on his way out.
It takes a concentrated effort not to fall into his usual funk about that. Instead:]
That other me…I wonder if Trench conjured the notion of him up to entertain itself, or if that dream was a brief connection to a reality that truly exists. And, if it's the latter, I wonder what his ending will be.
[The notion of other versions of himself out there doesn't bother him much. He doesn't really want to meet any of them, mind, but the idea of their existence doesn't trouble him.]
I have an unpleasant hunch that he may not last much longer than I did.
[It's a strange idea, but not one without merit. After all, there were the January sheddings, and there'd been an implication along those lines when they'd started finding dying Wastes in the crumbling dream that were themselves Sleepers.
Qrow feels similarly about the whole situation. It's honestly somewhat comforting to him that there's some version out there to deal with the war so he himself can firmly leave Remnant in the past and focus on the new life he's been building here. Even so, he wouldn't really want to be confronted with alternate versions of him either.]
If that Remnant ran across the same lines as mine, it's probably not a good ending, no. Huntsmen don't tend to last that long out there in general, and then you bring Salem into the equation for those of us in Oz's inner circle...
[he shakes his head]
You know how it is. Fighting in apocalypse wars isn't exactly good for your health.
[He expects his own ending to be far from peaceful. Especially knowing the state of things as he left them, two years ago. Because unless they're mistaken about it all, a Qrow with nothing more to lose is one that is one that's liable to be exceptionally reckless.]
No. And, on top of the usual nonsense, my semblance was — well, breaking things, essentially. I was still using my old name, so perhaps that was a tribute of sorts to my present one. [Break finally smiles again, but it's self-deprecating, and a little mean.] With no lock able to keep me out of places I should not have been, I imagine that version's capacity for getting into trouble was near limitless.
[He may not be the most self-aware person around, but any menace worth his salt can spot a skill or item absolutely no one wants him to have from a mile away. And there's no way any version of himself wouldn't make reckless decisions with an ability like that. Remnant Break may well be one who manages to get himself murdered before anything else takes him out.]
I carried a terribly boring sword with no shotguns in it for that reason, I’m sorry to tell you. And, I never bothered to replace my eye permanently. The risks in being unable to control what was damaged if my semblance got away from me were simply too great.
[You know how sometimes, someone says something and you get a Thought stuck in your head that's frankly dumb but it will not leave without being entertained? Qrow perhaps might have lingered a bit more on that last part and how he can relate to it, if not for that. Break can probably tell, if not from the bond, then from the silly smirk that forms on his lover's face.]
I don't know, it sounds like it still counts if your soul was the gun.
[…yeah. That's dumb. But it's dumb in a way that has Break opening and closing his mouth a couple of times as he gathers up a baffled protest, dumbly.]
Wha. That's — my soul is not explosive and noisy! [ lol ] And it wasn't as though I was going about blowing holes in things. You couldn't follow my trail of destruction and think, "ah, yes, the perpetrator of this business definitely had a gun."
[He waves his hands around ineffectually as he says this. Boyfriend just called him a shotgun??? He cannot believe —]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[The burst of melancholy is met with a little electric charge of anxiety; it's undirected, in this case. Formless, shapeless. But there's still a weight to it, serrated teeth in its edges.]
Caring enough to try to earn the ending you want means opening yourself up to the possibility of failing.
[It means scraping your ass off the pavement of a bar and fighting alongside your kids in Atlas despite the impossible odds, seemingly finding a path to the next chapter and watching it all fall to ruin before you.
There is a good reason they chose to walk away from Remnant, as the dream crumbled.]
no subject
It takes a concentrated effort not to fall into his usual funk about that. Instead:]
That other me…I wonder if Trench conjured the notion of him up to entertain itself, or if that dream was a brief connection to a reality that truly exists. And, if it's the latter, I wonder what his ending will be.
[The notion of other versions of himself out there doesn't bother him much. He doesn't really want to meet any of them, mind, but the idea of their existence doesn't trouble him.]
I have an unpleasant hunch that he may not last much longer than I did.
no subject
Qrow feels similarly about the whole situation. It's honestly somewhat comforting to him that there's some version out there to deal with the war so he himself can firmly leave Remnant in the past and focus on the new life he's been building here. Even so, he wouldn't really want to be confronted with alternate versions of him either.]
If that Remnant ran across the same lines as mine, it's probably not a good ending, no. Huntsmen don't tend to last that long out there in general, and then you bring Salem into the equation for those of us in Oz's inner circle...
[he shakes his head]
You know how it is. Fighting in apocalypse wars isn't exactly good for your health.
[He expects his own ending to be far from peaceful. Especially knowing the state of things as he left them, two years ago. Because unless they're mistaken about it all, a Qrow with nothing more to lose is one that is one that's liable to be exceptionally reckless.]
no subject
[He may not be the most self-aware person around, but any menace worth his salt can spot a skill or item absolutely no one wants him to have from a mile away. And there's no way any version of himself wouldn't make reckless decisions with an ability like that. Remnant Break may well be one who manages to get himself murdered before anything else takes him out.]
I carried a terribly boring sword with no shotguns in it for that reason, I’m sorry to tell you. And, I never bothered to replace my eye permanently. The risks in being unable to control what was damaged if my semblance got away from me were simply too great.
no subject
I don't know, it sounds like it still counts if your soul was the gun.
no subject
Wha. That's — my soul is not explosive and noisy! [ lol ] And it wasn't as though I was going about blowing holes in things. You couldn't follow my trail of destruction and think, "ah, yes, the perpetrator of this business definitely had a gun."
[He waves his hands around ineffectually as he says this. Boyfriend just called him a shotgun??? He cannot believe —]