[Changeling IC] Time's Wings: Dark Omens

[TheAmishPirate]

Aelas isn't listening to Lily as she starts talking. As they get into the room and separate from Static, she gives Edmund a shove. Not like, a super aggressive hostile shove, but she pushes him hard enough to be noticed given the significant difference between their strength and builds.

"Edmund, you...you...you ass!"

Language!

Aelas looks exasperated, her hair matches the slight flush that's in her face. "You're sooo busy trying to protect me because I'm, what, cute and fun or something, that you didn't notice that I'm trying to be cute and fun to get Static to open up a little! Jesus, let me take care of myself."

Edmund wobbled, but did not fall down. He took both shove and dressing-down with stubborn, stoic frown, yet there was chastisement enough in the silence that reigned after.

Turns out? He didn't want to be the reason Aelas swore a cuss. He didn't want that. No matter how much trouble her new friend was going to be, hashing it out right there, in front of everybody, wasn't the way to handle it.

Next time, he'd wait.

"Why don't we swear a formal oath?" he muttered, instead, from the corner of the room where he was hunched, thumbing idly at the screen of a (probably stolen) phone for some news or distractions to satisfy his ennui.

"No man may serve two masters." Isaac's tone is distant, for all that is a rolling thing out of the deep places of the sea. (The sea, where we shall carve out the heart of a decaying tyrant. We shall be heroes. And none of us are Summer, after all, and yet the words are burnt into his flesh.) "For either he shall hate the one and love the other." This comes from the scorched and bloody bone of him, not the part that just today has worried about the web of trust that lies all the tighter about him. The part that needs no thought. It is wound into a spot as tight as a bruise beside his knee. "Or else. He shall hold to the one, and despise the other. ei de mē, eipon an hymin!"

His terrible nails drum a executioner's beat on his knee. He sits packed into a corner, looking outwards at the assembled Changelings. His friends. His freedom. The familiar yoke. "The price of staying. Crowns and secrets. Are we worth such?"

"Anybody bring the Official Standard Motley Oath? I left my copy at home." Edmund snarked, but looked intently at no one as he said it.

No, no, it's okay. It's different. You know this. Clear terms, enforced terms, they can't abuse it and get away with it. You have a say. Remember. Remember. They're as bound to you as you are to them. Two-way street.

That still left him with the problem of being bound, but. Well. It's a start.

And for all his grumbling, he raises a valid point; there is no Standard Motley Oath. These things are tailored, unique to each group and their needs. It might be unwise to throw one together, huddled in the back office of a restaurant of questionable quality.