Claudia walks for what feels like a long time. The mask pressed to her face glints gold in the candlelight, a tarnished tangle of snakes like branches twisting around her eyes. She thought about taking it off to look at it, but maybe it's better not to know, better just to walk. She has time to think in the low light.
Thinking makes her angry. Anger is a distraction, she thinks, though she's used it to aim herself like an arrow in the past. She balls her small hands into fists and tries to empty her mind of everything but the flagstones beneath her feet. Slowly, the sound of revelry comes to her – music and laughter and footsteps and the rustle of fabric against skin – and with it a smell of blood so strong that her mind empties of its own accord and she presses her way inside. The heave of bodies threatens to overwhelm. She bumps people as she moves, her elbow to their arm, a curl of her hair brushing their shoulder, the tip of her shoe catching their heel. Her fangs slide out with ease. If she's dead, and surely she must be dead, then why is she still hungry?
Her hand snatches out, curls around someone's wrist. Her teeth flash, her eyes glint behind the mask. She's small, but stronger than she looks.
002.long gallery.
The iron tang of blood from the Long Gallery pulls Claudia to it eventually. This is more her scene than a dance, than a banquet, than the salty tang of sweat clogging the air. She saunters easily into the room, to a long display of knives left out for just anyone to take. For a while she watches others throw, her gaze tracking them and their glinting weapons, before she picks up a knife itself, aims for a brief moment, and throws it squarely at a Wretch. It misses the apple target so thoroughly that an observer would be justified in suspecting that she'd meant to embed it in the flesh of the Wretch's arm on purpose.
003.eyes wide shut.
The evening turns. Claudia thought it would, at some point. Or is it turning, if everything seems to have been hurtling towards a bloodbath all night?
There's no love lost in her for any of these people, any at all. She is a cold, jaded thing. She does what she can to pull together the sacrifices in their pale clothes, heaving them bodily towards the maw. There's something halfway funny about it, the image of a girl with her arms taut around someone's torso, dragging them without sympathy as if she's pulling along a sack of potatoes. "Stop strugglin'," she says, with some impatience. "No need to fight. Let it happen and it won't be so hard."
She's no Santiago and these are no whispered words of comfort, but she's never been much good at that anyway.
004.wildcard.
[ hmu if you want to do something different! i'm up for whatever. canonpoint is tentatively post-s2. ]
claudia — interview with the vampire.
Thinking makes her angry. Anger is a distraction, she thinks, though she's used it to aim herself like an arrow in the past. She balls her small hands into fists and tries to empty her mind of everything but the flagstones beneath her feet. Slowly, the sound of revelry comes to her – music and laughter and footsteps and the rustle of fabric against skin – and with it a smell of blood so strong that her mind empties of its own accord and she presses her way inside. The heave of bodies threatens to overwhelm. She bumps people as she moves, her elbow to their arm, a curl of her hair brushing their shoulder, the tip of her shoe catching their heel. Her fangs slide out with ease. If she's dead, and surely she must be dead, then why is she still hungry?
Her hand snatches out, curls around someone's wrist. Her teeth flash, her eyes glint behind the mask. She's small, but stronger than she looks.
002. long gallery.
003. eyes wide shut.
There's no love lost in her for any of these people, any at all. She is a cold, jaded thing. She does what she can to pull together the sacrifices in their pale clothes, heaving them bodily towards the maw. There's something halfway funny about it, the image of a girl with her arms taut around someone's torso, dragging them without sympathy as if she's pulling along a sack of potatoes. "Stop strugglin'," she says, with some impatience. "No need to fight. Let it happen and it won't be so hard."
She's no Santiago and these are no whispered words of comfort, but she's never been much good at that anyway.
004. wildcard.