He was lucky he couldn't dream, really.

If he could he would probably dream of odd things. Fire, torture, mayhem, pain, maybe - the sort of stuff that left people with bags under their eyes and fear of beds in their hearts. Or maybe something more surreal. Something that didn't play into any of his fear, but just fucking happened. He was lucky he didn't sleep, really - sure he was dormant for a couple hours a few times a day, but it let him be much more productive, instead of just wasting his time.

Something kept him awake nonetheless.

He didn't know what it was, it was just this... feeling. Like something was wrong. He supposed it could just be stress flaking off from him, breaking away from his soul, like he was molting. These past few days had been very stressful, after all. Three different injuries, three different circumstances, two people he couldn't help near as much as he wanted to. It only made sense he would be a little on edge after all that. He needed to read.

It was morning when he decided this, shifting out of the little nest in his house and over to the library. A half an hour walk, maybe, at a meandering pace. He certainly could go faster, but he was plagued by his brain chasing its own tail, working himself up over why there was this awful feeling inside his chest. Maybe he was sick - that would explain a lot, yes. It would explain the odd blurring on the edges of his vision, as well. That was odd, but - well, he attributed it to sickness, or stress. Couldn't be helped.

He made it into the library, pushing the doors in, nabbing a random book off the shelves and moving to his usual spot. It was coated in a thin layer of silk at this point, from him climbing up and down the table legs, and sometimes weaving and putting down a small blanket so he'd be more comfortable. The hard surface was hell on his hairs, after all. He opened the book, and read.

Tried to read, at least.

The words just seemed to blur, like he was looking through them through two layers of slightly misaligned glass, like foggy glasses.

It had to just be sickness. This was temporary. He'd be able to read tomorrow, he knew it. Right? Right. There was no point in assuming otherwise, because he couldn't - there wasn't -

No point in thinking about it. He just had to go do something else, to distract himself. He left the library in a huff, not even bothering to put his book back, just leaving it sitting on the table.

Another walk, this one shorter, much faster, as he moved to the forest. There was only other one thing to with his time, something that required a lot of focus, but not much thought. Something that'd occupy him so that he couldn't think about the thing that he refused to think about. He climbed a tree, pulling out silk, reaching out from a branch, moving to another tree, repeating the process until he had a sort of net or hammock constructed between four trees. A nest, hanging, where he could focus on a different craft.

Pull, pull more, fold, fold the other way, make some thin strands of silk to pull it together, lay it out, repeat. A scarf, white as snow, soft as can be. Simple and easy to make, at the speed of someone who had done it a thousand times, his limbs moving as if possessed by the spirit of a sewing machine, a focus brought about not by calm but by the opposite: distress. He was distressed, even if he couldn't show it beyond manic movements and uncharacteristic amounts of webbing.

A simple mistake made him curse aloud, under his breath, as he tossed the scarf over the side onto the dirty ground below. He had messed up his process, and apparently could not have that, although an inspection of the discarded fabric wouldn't reveal any immediate flaws.

tags - "speech"

Aurum didn't dream often. Hadn't, ever since those wild horrible dreams that had first let him in on the fact that he was really an angel. No, he no longer dreamed every night, instead only occasionally being visited by strange visions that he would never remember in the morning. However, when he did dream, it always seemed as though the random mishmash of subconscious thoughts that played in front of him was trying to tell him something, very deliberately. Sometimes he had absolutely no idea what was meant to be communicated to him by the chaos that ran through his dozing mind, but sometimes he knew exactly what it was trying to tell him, and he had just been ignoring it throughout his every waking day. No matter what he did, or how much he shoved unpleasant thoughts down deep inside, dreams always had a way of bringing things to the forefront for Aurum, even when he didn't want to be confronted by unpleasant things. Perhaps this was why Abathur would probably benefit from being able to dream. Sure, he would be struck with the same disadvantages that every dreamer like Aurum had, such as the occasional nightmare or restless sleep caused by exciting or distressing dreams, but they would also probably enable the spider to actually confront the things that he hid away, rather than burying himself into something else in order to distract from it. Aurum didn't really have much of a leg to stand on in that department, since he often threw himself into his work to distract from anything unpleasant going on in his life, but he always ended up confronting it eventually, and usually that was the work of his dreams.

The lion had been out for a walk that day, eager to stretch his muscles after several days cooped up inside of his house, sleeping for hours in order to give his body time to recover. His chest was still bound up in simple white bandages that covered the wound inflicted upon him by Uriel, but he was feeling well enough to go out, even if Roy had made him promise not to do anything too official or straining. Just being able to take in the fresh air and be back out in Tanglewood's tangled – hah – but beautiful territory was enough to put a smile on the proxy's face, and he found himself humming casually as he walked along, taking long strides over mud and crushing leaves beneath his paws. His stroll thus far had been completely silent and peaceful, but the lion found himself perking up when a single soft curse split through the serene silence, and his one blue eye darted around in confusion as he looked for the source. It took a moment for him to look upward, but when he did, he found a soft and white scarf falling right on his face, covering his remaining good eye. He let out a startled little grunt, before he chuckled, pulling the scarf from his face and inspecting it for a long moment, finding no obvious flaws in it, to him at least. Looking back upward, the lion gave a few long strokes of his wings, ans he was up in the air, flying to a nearby tree to where Abathur was positioned. Settling down on one of the stronger branches, the large lion tilted his head to one side before speaking, his voice a low rumble, "Abathur...? What are you doing? And why'd you throw this on the ground?" He lifted one large paw to display the seemingly flawless scarf that Abathur had carelessly tossed away, a frown of confusion playing on the proxy's lips. Aurum was used to Abathur seeming... distant. Or, at the very least, used to him behaving very oddly, so this was even more strange. Rather than Abathur's usual oddness, he had instead taken on this new state, where he seemed vaguely aggravated whilst also being totally zeroed in on the task at hand. It was a bit concerning, and Aurum found himself wondering what had put the large arachnid in such a state. As his eye flicked down to look at the slightly dirty white bandages covering his chest, Aurum even found himself wondering if he could somewhat be at fault.

He felt the presence of Aurum on a nearby branch before heard the lion's rumbling voice, which startled him greatly, making his body scrunch up as he looked at the intruder. Thankfully, it was just the angel-slash-lion-slash-proxy whose life he had a hand in saving, who was so kind to all for seemingly no reason. Truly an enigma wrapped in a mortal prison wrapped in bandages. "Greetings," he said, voice more than a touch more tired than usual, as he continued his weaving at a much slower pace. "Just... weaving. Releasing stress. Would prefer to read, but..." He let out a small grumble, disdainful in tone, before metaphorically shaking his head, responding to Aurum's next question with, "Made mistake in process. Cannot tolerate," he paused for a moment, searching for the right words, even his swiftly moving limbs going still, "Cannot tolerate mistake in development of anything. Must be efficient. Proper." Hopefully that made sense to the lion, he thought, his limbs resuming their progress.

He didn't even know if it made sense to himself anymore.

The spider wondered, suddenly, if Aurum truly was okay, something that caused him to stop moving again as he tried to focus his vision enough to see the lion's face clearly. He hadn't sounded like anything was wrong, but - well, sounds could be deceiving. It was much harder to school your face than your voice (though for him, lacking facial muscles, the reverse was true), so surely that would be more revealing, yes? But it seemed that the more he tried to focus his eyes, the less focused they became, so he let out a sigh, deciding to ask the lion directly instead. "Why is subject Aurum here? Medical issues? Is wound okay?" He asked, desperate to shift the conversation away from anything that would lead back to his own issues, a desperation that didn't show in his voice beyond an easily seen-past facade covering his exhaustion. A mere veil that did nothing to help his actual problems. A band-aid over a gaping wound, as it were.

tags - "speech"

Normally, Abathur's analytical and monotone voice would be no cause of concern for Aurum, since the lion had grown used to it since the male had joined, and it often didn't betray any hidden emotions or deeper meaning. However, now, as Abathur tried his damnedest to both weave and speak to the lion at the same time, Aurum found himself worried by the other's tone. He wanted to reach out and comfort Abathur somehow, although he kept himself in one place on his branch at the moment, doubting that even Abathur's meticulously made web nest would be enough to hold his weight. As Aurum mulled over what to say in response to Abathur's first worrying statement, Selby approached, the medic offering his own sagely and kind words of advice up to Abathur. The proxy was quick to latch onto these, nodding his head as he spoke, a faint grateful smile shot down to the feline below, "Yeah, it's just like Selby said. Everybody makes mistakes, and they're what makes it so that we grow as people. Hell, mistakes can even give character to certain things, especially things like this scarf here. Trying to force yourself to be efficient and proper and all of that without a single mistake... you'll just burn yourself out and it'll be a nightmare. Trust me, I would know. I used to do that all the time." He blamed himself for everything wrong that ever happened in Tanglewood, believing that he had made some kind of mistake, or had done something wrong, even when there was nothing he could've done... he remembered just how that had broken him down more than a few times, and really hadn't brought anything but trouble. A sigh left the male's mouth as he contemplated the past, before his ears perked up at Abathur's next question, this one directed specifically at him. Blinking in surprise, the proxy quickly shook his head, providing helpfully, "No, no, I'm fine. I mean, my chest is a little sore, but that's to be expected... I was mostly just out for a walk and your scarf... fell on me. I was a bit worried about you, all alone up here, so I figured I'd check up on you. You know, like friends do." Perhaps Abathur didn't truly consider them to be friends yet, but Aurum certainly did, much like he did with most other members of Tanglewood.