( julian's mouth opens and closes. she... doesn't know where the plague came from? oh, god. it wasn't common knowledge, obviously, but he had always just sort of assumed she knew. why else would she have such a bone to pick with lucio? ...well. besides the ten thousand other things the little bastard did wrong. but that was a big one. he'd told the others, but they must not have...

he's not so sure he wants to tell her right now, anyway. what the hanged man told him and what he planned to do about it. what someone beat him to doing about it, even. frowning, he just closes his mouth again. between those two subjects, hell, he'll take the latter. it's easy to talk about his own suffering. it's easy to shit-talk lucio, too, even to his mother's face, but maybe not so much in the vein of "your son is responsible for everything wrong with the world, kinda." he'll get to that later. )

I honestly couldn't tell you. The seconds felt like years. The years felt like minutes. There wasn't any clear passage of time there. No day or night, no continuity. I'd go to sleep in one place and wake up in another. And this transformation... that started after ages and ages of struggling. Only once I accepted my place and stopped trying to fight it.

( his wings have settled, by now, to droop limply behind him as ever. they're a mess of scraggly feathers on the undersides, but he couldn't reach them to groom them without knowing how to move them and wouldn't want to even if he could. at least he isn't grabbing anymore. his arms remained draped around her shoulders, his eye contact faltering at times, but returning before long. )

It was more than months. More than years. But how long... long enough for it not to matter anymore, that's all I know.