deercountry | 09 . bone house summer

"...Yeah, I don't know how to bake anything. I cook all my stuff on the stove," the freckled young man admits with a rueful smile, scratching the back of his mop of green hair. Kaworu may remember this about him, but Midoriya doesn't know God well at all. God seems kindly, inscrutable, and has been to space. He can also heal ė̵̩̂ͅy̴̥͔͊ḙ̴̘͒s̸̘͑͊, which spoke to his power long before Palamedes sketched out necromancy for Midoriya while they worked on a project.

Midoriya, a frequent overnight visitor and occasional purveyor of stovetop breakfast, stands in his socks in God's kitchen. He's about midway between God and Kaworu's heights, well-muscled for a small frame, and heavily scarred. (If the unofficial uniform of Hunters and Heroes grosses anyone out, well, summer's here. It's too hot for Midoriya to wear anything more than a T-shirt and basketball shorts.)

An assortment of ingredients has been gathered on the counter, hopefully to be transmuted into something... okay. That's the bar he's set. He would eventually like to get good enough to make something nice for his friends.

"We all start somewhere," says God, absently, while he goes rifling through the apparently moonlight-powered refrigerator for berries. Kindly and inscrutable is the gist of it; he is, as usual, good-natured and a little distant, but glad enough to have Kaworu and his— well, however the kids are labeling things these days— being wholesomely domestic. "I burned everything I touched for the first, oh, who knows how long. No talent whatsoever. But I had a few good friends to teach me."

He turns to the pair of teens, holding a carton of fruit in each hand. First of the new crop, now that June is coming on. "So: blueberries? Raspberries? What are we feeling?"

"Hmm," Kaworu looks between the two. He's not exactly an expert on baking or fruit. He usually just takes whatever is given to him by Paul in one of his many baking experiments. And the truth is, it doesn't really matter to him here either. The goal was entirely focused on Izuku spending more time at the house and with Teacher. Perhaps out of some odd desire for Teacher's approval in all aspects of life.

After a few moments, he shrugs and gestures to the raspberries.

"The like the color of those."

He smiles fondly at Kaworu, knowing he is concerned with higher things than the taste of food. He doesn't (yet?) know that Kaworu is seeking God's approval, but he knows he loves doing things with the people he likes.

"I'm kind of nervous about the oven to be honest--Don't worry, I don't intend to burn anything. Thank you for letting us do this."

Even if Midoriya wasn't concerned with making a good impression on the person whose house this is, he is by nature helpful. He takes the raspberries to wash them, taking care with their delicate flesh-covered seeds. He doesn't sneak one to eat, in the time-honored tradition of chefs tasting their food or young people being Like That, but he won't judge anyone who does.

"Excellent choice," says God, as he hands off the berries. He isn't doing much work, here. A bit of family bonding, a bit of moral support. It's more interesting than kicking around his tent in Lumenwood.

"I'm sure we'll survive even if things don't go quite to plan. I promise you, I'll have eaten worse." Somewhere, Harrowhark Nonagesimus is haunted by the memory of soup.

"I used to not eat much before I came here." He says, like this is a normal and helpful thing as he washes Midoriya wash the raspberries. "It was easier to just feed me nutritional blocks and other things intravenously. I knew people ate so many different things but there's so much effort behind it."

He pulls a bowl down from a shelf and hands it to Teacher, looking hopeful that it's something they need.

He knew this, but it still makes him chew his lip a little as he sets the raspberries on the counter. Very often, he is confronted with Kaworu's terrible childhood. It makes him want to protect him more, but that's not quite the end goal either. Midoriya is learning to support Kaworu's own fearlessness and strength, to walk alongside it.

Thus, he finds himself encouraging new experiences--going out and about in the city, and now, baking.

"I promise this will be better than both those things," he says emphatically. He dries his hands. The running water reminded him of something. Nature calls.

"Excuse me, I'll be right back."

Damned if that isn't the most pathetic thing he has ever heard, and the God of Necromancers has lived long enough to really know what sad looks like. He scrubs a hand back through his hair, briefly— incredulous? impressed? simply tired?— and he nods Midoriya away.

He takes the bowl from Kaworu, anyway, and goes to dig out further ingredients from the pantry.

"You be our taste-tester, then. Give the berries a try, let me know how much sugar we'll be dumping in."

[Kaworu places a few of the berries into the palm of his hand, rolling them around and admiring their bright color. The world is harsh but it's beautiful in all the things it can create.

He throws them back into his mouth by pressing his palm to his lips, like how someone might ingest pills. The berries briefly touch his tongue and he makes a face.]

More sugar?

[ After a year and change of watching Harrow school her expression at teatime and scrunch her nose at meals, he cracks a smile to see the same on Kaworu. ]

More sugar it is. Grab us something to mix with, will you?

[ There are utensils in the drawer, and big mixing spoons hanging by the knife block. He goes to rifle through the pantry again, in the meantime. It is, unsurprisingly, looking a little sparse. ]

[He turns, dutifully, towards the drawer to take out something to mix it with. A spoon probably.

A spoon. His hand hovers over the drawer. His mind says "spoon" yet his hand moves, like puppeted by invisible strings, towards the part of the drawer containing sharps. Paul is very particular about how things are sorted. He's helped sort this drawer dozens of times. His hand brushes the spoons and then abruptly jerks left towards the knives.

He has to protect his house... It's just Teacher there but if he's not supposed to fight teacher then why does he feel like this...? But it's Teacher... why would he...?

As if in a bizarre compromise between the effects of the berry and Kaworu's mind, his fingers clench around a butter knife. It's the worst sort of compromise.

In a swift motion, he pivots on one foot, twisting to face Teacher, and then as one foot lands, the other lungs forward in tandem with his arm, slamming the blunt knife as hard as he can into the man's side.]

[ God turns around and the kid punches a butter knife into his ribcage.

For a moment, everything hangs still. John stumbles back with the impact, briefly astonished, and makes a sound like an aborted Whoa; he knocks into the counter, catches his balance there. He looks at Kaworu, then down to the knife sticking out of his side. It's lodged solidly and shifts when he breathes, Darkblood fizzling up through the slit in his plain black shirt. ]

Okay, [ says God, slowly, still with a butter knife sticking out of his side. His brow has pinched in absolute, total confusion. ] This is not a traditional step in baking a crumble.

He wanders casually back into the kitchen, hands washed and ready for more baking—

Kaworu-kun! is the shocked exclamation he has no time to voice. He only acts, his training enough to swiftly take in this tableau as he springs forward: Kaworu attacking someone Midoriya thought he liked, and God being reasonable about it, no doubt due to his skill with manipulation of flesh.

Though he'd like to see neither of them come to harm, Midoriya is more concerned about protecting Kaworu than his victim.

It's like a silly little dance, the way Midoriya slips in from the side to behind Kaworu. It's a move he copied from Uraraka--effective but not injurious. If he can grasp Kaworu's hands and turn him away from God and towards where he can pin him against the counter, he can safely find out what the hell is going on.

Because Midoriya comes from a world where superpowers are the majority and Japan has strict laws about the use of Quirks on public property, he is ever conscious of the fact that Kaworu didn't use his A.T. Field or his Darkblood powers. Neither does Midoriya use his Quirk. In all of this, Midoriya's alarm is not quite panic; this unexplained situation is not great, but all the claws are still mercifully sheathed.

Well. Huh. Weird seeing this place in the daylight, but Anna doesn't really mind it. She strolls up, looking far too casual for the... scene, for the area, for everything. But that's not too different from usual; it's still a Fall Out Boy tee, and she's still got her matte black arms on full display, and her torn jeans are still showing one matte black leg. She looks normal as hell, as far as she's concerned. It's the manor that looks weird.

Maybe it's because she knows who lives in it, and she's not exactly ready to have the confrontation—conversation with the master of this particular house quite yet. (When will she be ready? Christ, she doesn't know.) So instead she's... just kind of sticking with her normal plan. Know the people around him, and see what they know, and find out who her allies might be. So she turns on her heel and heads over to the shed instead, which is one of the places on this estate that she hasn't, somehow, been yet.

She can't tell from appearances whether anyone's inside, but it looks in... livable condition, at least. So she walks around slowly, carefully. Steps up to the window and peers inside, for safety and curiosity's sake. Once she's appropriately cased the joint, she does what a normal person would do and raps on the door. "Anyone home? Big house is out there, you know."

The door swings open almost at once, which would mean more if the shed was not so small that rising from either of the narrow chairs or the cot at its back and crossing to the threshold was not a matter of moments. The man who has opened it fills the doorway with his rounded bulk, a few inches taller than the woman who has come calling on him.

Ortus has no standard by which to judge the appearances of most people in Trench, so he refrains. The most that her sleek, muted black limbs signify to him is a reasonable taste in color. His own appearance is of greater concern to him, and he is terribly and thoroughly conscious of his bared knees underneath his black and many-pocketed shorts, drawing his draping outer robe across his chest to conceal them.

His paint is at least in order, with the addition of a fixative element that has (so far) resisted the melting heat of this 'summer'. It conceals a myriad of sins, although the fattening of his lower lip can only be minimized in a wash of black, not wholly erased.

"I am aware," he says, with gathered dignity, "How may I be of service?"

(Behind him, someone stirs, a creaking of furniture heralding their movement.)

Oh, huh. Okay. Well, she wasn't expecting to see a face that's harder to recognize than some other inhabitants of this house, but at least the face paint makes it clear that she's talking to someone from the Nine Houses. Which narrows it down.

"Hey, uh. Name's Anna. Came by sort of looking for Teacher, but thought I'd check out what's going on in this shed first. Think I missed it the last time I was here, and I didn't know there were people living here, too."

And again, she's not a very nosy person, but she can hear the creaks and she's at least a little worried that this may, in fact, be a terrible time. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"Not in the least," Ortus says, with an uncharacteristic (although she can hardly know that yet) smoothness, stepping out of the shed and closing the door carefully behind him.

"My visitor is a patient one." Ortus explains, as if that's all there is to be said. He'd prefer that it was.

Besides. They have other matters to discuss, such as the realization that furrows his brows as he takes her in and fully comprehends her words.

"Lady Amaranth?" He hazards, tentatively. "Ortus Nigenad. I believe we conversed on the Omni device."

"Oh, hey!" she says, a smile not quite erupting but certainly creeping its way to her face. "We sure as hell did. Glad you got out."

Okay, now she sort of knows who she's talking to, but she recognizes that she has... well. She has some stuff she could address with him that she's also recently addressed with Gideon. But that's not the reason she's here. In fact, she has a totally different line of questioning now.

"What, did they run out of room in the giant manor? This doesn't exactly look like where I'd put one of Harrow's cavaliers."

Perhaps, Ortus thinks, with the faint desperation of someone who has begun to grasp the future they have created for themselves, he should put up a sign explaining his choice of dwelling somewhere on the door. It would relieve him of the task of defending a decision that he cannot credibly explain, or at least the opening salvo of the first question that any reasonable person would have cause to ask.

"I have ceded the title of cavalier primary to Gideon Nav," Ortus says, with a touch of nervousness sweeping across the back of his neck at her smile (or it could be sweat brought on by the sun, which seems to grow more baleful by the day), "And it is not a consideration of room, but of respect for those august personages who reside in the manor."

"I asked to be permitted use of this structure, Lady Amaranth," he adds, less stiffly, with a timid plea for understanding in his tone. "I would offer its use to you, under other circumstances."

Perhaps a sign would help. Or perhaps Anna can just take it at its face, because there are always going to be aspects of this house of bones that she does not know or understand, no matter how much she tries to actually get there. Which kind of brings her, at least mentally, to the reason for the visit.

"Hey, I get it." She only sort of does, but backs off anyway. "Sorry about coming out like that. You probably get it a lot. But hey, here's something that you probably don't get a lot—" and she shifts her weight to her back leg as she gears up for the possibility of learning more about a pretty big mystery.

"Remember how you were talking about a horrible beast in the River?" Because Anna sure does. "Kind of wanted to pick your brain about all that stuff a little. Call it professional interest."

There are very few souls in this world or any other who can manage a depth of contemplative silence as Ortus can. He chews over thoughts as ruminants chew over their fodder, for much the same end.

"You are astute," he says, after some time, timidity supplanted by apparent placidity, "I am not often consulted on matters which concern horrible beasts."

He ventures a lightening of expression which is not even the wan cousin of a smile, but one that in spite of its deficiencies manages to express a degree of welcoming.

"I would tell you what I can, if you wish," a short pause, as he turns half-away from her, at a trajectory that leads away from the shed and its occupant, "And you are forgiven," he finishes, over his shoulder, as he walks towards a low bench he has dredged up from a junk heap elsewhere.

She follows in his wake, quietly surprised that he'd agreed and that he'd managed to do it so clearly, at that. But she guesses, again silently and only to herself, that people who write word upon word on the page might not always do the same when speaking. God knows she sounds more eloquent when she's writing things down.

"Thanks," she says quietly as she takes her seat and tries to ignore the way the bench creaks under the density of her metallic body. "I understand if you can't tell me much. I'm kind of getting the idea that there's a lot going on with the Dominicus system that I'll never understand." She'll hold back on offering any information in trade for now; she doesn't know Ortus very well, and doesn't know if he'll ask to begin with.

She folds her hands between her legs and looks on the ground in front of her. "I think I understand what the River is. It's the place where souls go when they die," and she thinks that'll do as a basic enough understanding. "So I guess my first question is why there would be something living in it at all. If you had to fight it, it's either something that's supposed to be there or something that really, really isn't."

There is a line that Ortus may walk in a kind of uncollapsed ignorance. He spoke of the Beasts openly, and he was not rebuked by the Lord. His Lady has not spoken to anyone, so far as he can ascertain, about her knowledge of what occurred within the bubble.

He raises only a surprised eyebrow at the creaking of her upon the bench, but has the grace to look embarrassed at himself. It is not as if he does not tend to do the same to furniture, broad and tall as he is.

"A cavalier is not called upon to know much of necromantic theorems," Ortus says, which is strictly true, while saying nothing of what a cavalier - or historian-poet - might choose to learn, if inclined, "But you have answered your own question in its asking. There is nothing that lives in the River. One must assume the Beast, then, is a dead thing."

"I shudder to imagine what it might have been when it was not," he continues, glancing away towards the earth as well alongside her. "I have dreamed of it since. I do not remember what it looked like, and yet I wake weeping for its hideousness."

Perhaps more than he intended to say, or knew that he might.

Anna has been tugging at threads for only a couple months now. She doesn't have nearly enough to weave everything together, and she doesn't think that this is going to be enough on its own, either. But she has a suspicion, and one that only comes up when he mentions that this thing had to be dead. That it wasn't something that invaded the River, but something that was born there.

"And it's just human souls down there?" she asks, then corrects herself, realizing that she never really asked. "Or—sorry, I don't know if that's the right word." She has to stop herself from phrasing that very differently, lest she say too much too fast. "And post-Resurrection souls specifically, I guess. Or is it every soul that's ever existed?"

Because if it's the latter, and she has no idea which way to lean, then she has an idea that she does not like. She'll give voice to it eventually, and probably very soon, but she hates that it's even a possibility. (But wouldn't it be what He deserves?)

Ortus quirks his eyebrows at her when she stumbles over the word human, a minute twitch he schools back to impassivity almost at once. The hesitation at first recalls the slurs laid at the feet of the people of the Nine Houses, the cries of zombies and wizards, words he has only had hurled at him in hatred once, but memorably enough he will not forget their blow.

But that isn't what she means, so far as he can tell, although he may be wrong. She keeps company with the Emperor, and seems on good terms with the others. So what, then, does she mean by it?

"That is a question that lies beyond my knowledge," he answers, truthfully, "And the knowledge of even the keenest scholars of the River. Logic would suggest that if these Beasts roam it, other creatures that bear souls, whatever they may resemble, may also find their place in its waters."

"As for the matter of souls after the Resurrection," and he also wonders who informed her of that distinction, and how she marks its importance, "I have heard a theory, though I cannot expound on its details. A lady of surpassing brilliance once put to me that there is the River, which we know, and the River Beyond, which we do not. A place that souls are meant to transit to through the waters of death, but to which most souls may no longer reach, though again, as to the cause -"

He shakes his head: "As I said. I am not a necromancer. I cannot speculate."

Leave it to Anna to treat the actual bewildering stuff so casually and only get tripped up on things that matter far less in the long run. She listens, leaning forward, hooked on each word that Ortus tells her.

"So the River is more like a purgatory instead of an actual afterlife," she says, calling on distant memories of theology as she theorizes. "And something is stopping it up. Something is holding back souls from being able to move on to Heaven, or—the River Beyond." Maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose. She taps her chin idly. Nothing to go on there, unfortunately.

"I know you keep telling me you aren't a necromancer," she starts instead, because there's something here, she can feel it, "But do you know about, like, the basics?" Wrong question. She pauses again. "I don't know how basic it is, actually. But do you know if there's any... man, I don't know. Necromantic benefit to keeping all those souls stuck down there? Even just, like, in theory."

And before she lets Ortus reply, she sits up a little straighter and looks at him. "And if that's the kind of question that you need something from me first before you're comfortable answering, go for it."

Heaven and purgatory are words that Ortus knows, but their denotation in Anna's usage is peculiar, as if they are discrete places and not qualities. Ortus knows well how the meaning of words can drift (and had, once, a slender notebook crammed to the margins such such observances), so his noting of this difference has something of the abstract sense of a self-taught linguist.

It does not weigh on him as her next question does. If she deceives him with false guilelessness, she plays the innocent better than any soul he has known.

The silence lasts a spell between them. Ortus arranges his hands inside the sleeves of his robes. He contemplates.

He thinks of his mother.

"I am not a necromancer," he says, looking back to Anna, his expression that the careful neutrality of a man who knows how to keep his own counsel, "But my blood is of the Eighth House. The Emperor's Pure. The soul siphoners."

He gives her this for nothing. He gives her this for Sister Glaurica, long dead, who wept at nothing and tore her robes and could not sleep in the dark, and who was never told what her love might cost her.

"The soul is a wellspring of power," he tells her, calmly, "It is also a barrier between the body and that which would swim from beneath the River to dwell within it. Either may be made fuel for necromancy. The soul may be burned, or it may be jarred aside, to draw on these unknown fathoms. The act is one of great danger, but great power, a high holy rite."

"One might theorize," he continues, as if he speaks in idle thought, "That an unscrupulous necromancer might attempt to recreate a fascimile of the River. A tributary. From there, what power might they glean from such unhallowed, unanchored souls?"

"So we are blessed that such dominion falls only to our Kindly Prince, who safeguards us from such monstrous acts." He turns to the house of the First, and without a trace of irony, inclines his head in deepest respect. "May his reign last eternal. May what is reborn never die."

Edited 2022-07-09 00:45 (UTC)

As Ortus shares this knowledge, it feels like he might also have an idea of what the whole purpose of it all could be. Like maybe something is powering it all, like maybe there's a reason that the River is stopped up like that. And like maybe, in his own less than subtle way, he is telling her exactly who did it.

"May what is reborn never die," she mutters, echoing it not like a prayer but like it's a quaint little joke that only she knows the punchline to. Is that what he's teaching them? And yet, he says something else, before the eschatological breakdown that is immensely worrying to her, that strikes her as curious beyond anything else. He's a Cavalier of the Ninth, isn't he? Or he was, at some point. Wouldn't it make sense for him to—oh, come now, Mädchen, have you never heard of immigrants before?

She takes a long moment after the end of the prayer to compose her next question in a way that Ortus might not take offense to. "How far," she starts, "is the Eighth from Dominicus? You know, how the Sixth is closest and the First is third from the star." Yes, Anna, that's hard to misinterpret. But that's the easy part of her question. Her eye slides over to the manor, and she bites her lower lip just slightly.

He's given a lot of information about souls, and what people within the confines of the Nine Houses can do with them. And he's done it without asking for a single thing in return. So, she decides, fuck it. "Would it mean much to you if I told you what the Eighth used to be called?"

This is how Ortus betrays himself: he does not startle when Anna speaks to him of what the Eighth used to be called, though such knowledge has been lost for a myriad. He looks at her, long and half-lidded, and in this cast of the light the flecks of dark churned-earth brown in the black of his irises (Ninth black, Drearburh black) are visible once more.

"It is the seventh planet from Dominicus." He does not look up to the dizzying blue sky, which would show him nothing. He gazes into the middle distance, a carefully cultivated reserve, his head slightly tilted as if he listens to a voice beyond hers, though of course he does not. Ortus has never been mad. Perhaps it would have been a comfort.

"I have never been there," he confesses, with a trace of something too wan to be wistful, the indifference left when hope is extinguished. "I would know it, all the same."

She pays attention to his reaction, and she revises her idea of immigrant to something maybe a little closer to refugee. The significance of his eye color is lost on her, but she can see something that, were she pressed, she might have also been able to identify in the way her mother spoke of Germany.

It lends a gravity to the situation, which is unfortunate because Anna is going to make it sound slightly ridiculous. "Always forget the order near the end," she says, then quietly mutters through something that sounds like it begins "my very eager mother" as she counts on her fingers. When she reaches seven, she stops as her mouth forms the word "us", then looks to Ortus.

"Uranus," she says, emphasis on the first syllable. "Named for the god of the sky, from a civilization that believed in that kind of thing. I think we sent some unmanned crafts there, but nobody could ever live there before the Liberator of Death, blessings and peace be upon him, came along." Deciding she can give slightly more, she adds, "The Ninth was called Pluto, if you were curious. If it adds anything else to it."

At the naming of the worlds, Ortus seems to swell with a great and ponderous dignity that forbids even the imagining of any sort of crude interpretation of the syllables Anna so particularly pronounces. It is the name of another god. It is the name of a pale and gleaming world he will never see, but whose heritage he bears. It is not, in the slightest respect, apt.

(Ortus has never slapped anyone. He had never been so tempted as he was by the sour milk spill of the Eighth's Master Templar.)

"Pluto," he repeats, rolling the word in his mouth like a marble, leaving the other acknowledged in its absence, "What was it named for?"

The Eighth was his mother's world. The Ninth - Pluto - is his, for all its cold cruelty. The pale columns of bone in the Anatasian, the heroes of their House laid out in stark and solemn repose; the great chapel and its echoing pews; the whispering dark cloisters. Yearning clenches his gut in a bout of unexpected sickness, rises unchecked in his eyes.

This is, Anna thinks to herself, one of the biggest surges of emotion she has seen come from Ortus in the short time she has known him. And that is all the evidence that she needs to treat this with seriousness. After all, it's not every day someone decides to divulge information that's been lost for 10,000 years. And she can see, even with half as much sight as most people in Trench, how personally important this is to him.

She steadies herself, and she doesn't affect any kind of voice to make it sound more dramatic; if anything, she sounds like a professor—or maybe a tour guide at a planetarium. She's absolutely been one of those before, after all. "Pluto. Named after the Greek god of the underworld." She thinks back to Bulfinch, and thinks of what little she's picked up of the Ninth, and thinks of what it must feel like to be members of a House that, according to Gideon, is just absolutely the shitnastiest place in the Dominicus system (no doubt as decided by the Dominicus system). And she knows what she will say.

"People feared him, because that's what you do with dead things, right? And of course, the god who ruled the realm of the dead would be awash in death himself. He holds the key to the rivers of the underworld, where all souls go when they die. Acheron, Phlegethon, Styx, Cocytus..." She holds out four fingers on her other hand and shakes it like she's trying to remember a fifth, but it escapes her. So she shakes her hand out dismissively, then rests her elbow on her thigh and leans forward to put her head in her hand.

"But everyone forgets that seeds grow underground, too. Everyone forgets that the tallest trees, the healthiest crops, the most beautiful flowers, they all come from the same pitch-black underworld. They forget that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to find the light from above." She's emphasizing these things for a reason, yes. There are a thousand other things she could talk about with Pluto—the god, or the planet. None of them are exciting, and none of them are very useful. So she ends with a very simple, "I always thought Pluto got a bad rap."

The name of the Eighth inspired no mirth in him. Next to nothing inspires mirth in Ortus, who approaches the whole subject of levity with the nervous suspicion of one whose experience of humor had been, on the whole, on the bludgeoning end of cruelty.

This seems, at first, to be such a thing again. Another comic blow in the long litany of comic blows that left Ortus the roundly clownish flinch of a human being that he is. The name of a dead god of death, for a tomb planet where dead rivers ran dry, and all the blood of their House was used to flood their banks to whelp one last little, lonely god of death, who called him back across the River with her keys and her terror.

I always thought Pluto got a bad rap, Anna says, in well-meant effort to soften the leaden strike, and he pins his tongue between his teeth as if he is a child.

He does look at the sky. It burns his eyes to do it, brings a welt of saltwater to their corners.

"Only half-apt a name," he says, and he hears himself only distantly, "Such is often the case with allusion."

She watches his reaction, trying to figure out whether she's said something right. There's something about dealing with poets that makes her extremely aware of her words, though she's only really run into one other in the past. He was no less mysterious, and probably carried with him a great deal of depression. But he was also a sentient, human sword, so maybe the comparisons can get drawn back a little, huh, girl?

Instead, then, she adds on to the idea of how apt the name really is. "Could be because of the allusion," she says. "Could be because it was named by an eleven year old girl from my grandparents' time and the only time we ever visited it was a fly-by seven years ago. The Ninth House was a mystery to us." And, with her eye towards the manor, "All of us."

Edited 2022-07-14 00:36 (UTC)

Rarely is Ortus at a loss for words. He often exercises his discretion in whether or not he utters them, but the words are there. They have been one of the few unshakable constants.

He does not have them here. He hardly knows where he would begin to explain. His shoulders turn in, his hands shifting on his lap without settling anywhere in particular, a troubled look creasing his face as he lowers light-stung eyes trailing sparks in his vision to the earth.

"There are scholars of the Nine Houses who have spent the whole of their lives searching for less knowledge than this. For remnants and scattered fragments, buried in what remained of the pre-Resurrection corpus." He allows his eyes to draw shut, shaking his head. "I should rejoice to be so blessed."

Anna takes a moment to wrangle the weight of those words. Not that Ortus considers it a blessing, no, though that's certainly heavy enough on its own. But really, it's the idea that she's this sort of... living archive of a time that Teacher remembers, but refuses to share. That his disciples may know, but based on her conversation with Gus, have likely forgotten. For an entire solar system, ten thousand years in Anna's future, she is the only living, willing connection to their past.

It's a lot to put on her shoulders. The bench creaks again as her weight shifts, her hands pressing into it like she's making to get up but not quite getting there yet.

"I can't tell you what to do," she says, "But I wouldn't think of it as a blessing." For a reason she's not planning to discuss, she smiles, closes her eye, and mutters something that sounds like "dammit" in a slow realization. Then she tilts her head back so at least one of them can still be looking upward. "If we don't learn from history, not only are we doomed to repeat it, but we lose an essential piece of what makes us human. So think of me as just... righting a wrong."

She doesn't sound like she's going for magnanimity at all; her voice has barely changed from the casual, scratchy tone she normally uses, even if it's a little softer from trying to make this conversation more private. "You know, if you want."

The woman sitting next to him is like and unlike the one Ortus spoke to on the network. Her irreverence remains, but much of the brashness seems to have left her. Or perhaps there has been, instead, a greater change in his perception of her than any alteration within her.

Perhaps nothing is so simple as to be wholly one thing or the other. The world rarely has ever been so, in Ortus' experience.

"You have come to me for answers, and yet it seems I am the one who kneels as supplicant," he intones, gravely, but some of the strain has left him. He beholds her from the corner of his eye, affixing her phrasing to memory. To describe it as a wrong, to know it as one, instead of a tragic accident of history...it is a thing he must ponder at greater length.

"I would be greatly in your debt, were you to tell me more of this history." Their history. "It would be tiresome, I think, to continue in repetition."

Anna smiles warmly at the offer, letting her past come back to greet her directly in the face. If she'd known she would be sharing her knowledge with someone who needed her as a primary source, she would've taken that planetarium job way more seriously. But hey... maybe her life is unfolding in the right direction after all.

So yes, she smiles, and when she speaks next it's as a friend. Aspirational, perhaps, since she really doesn't know anything about Ortus beyond what she's picked up from everything subtle and understated in his glances, his behavior. Maybe one day. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I can keep going. But you wouldn't be in my debt." She wriggles her Omni out of her pocket and holds it in her open palm in front of her. It briefly flashes on an outdated version of a document that she clicks through, hopefully quickly enough, to bring up the infographic that Palamedes knows well.

"I was working on mapping Houses to existing planets. It would've been a lot easier if he'd resurrected them in order, but we can't always get what we want." She points at the one labeled Sixth and says, "Mercury." And for the First, "Earth."

Ortus' first friendships after the age of seventeen began under much more dire circumstances than this, although the stakes are no less high than they once were.

He leans over to look at her Omni with reticent carefulness, allowing himself a certain closeness reserved for companionable comfort within the claustrophobic walls of the Ninth, and beholds a map like he has never seen. He extends a hand, forgetting his scraped knuckles, and hovers over the Eighth, traces to the Ninth. It hardly seems so far as it did when he imagined it.

"It was not the order of Resurrection, but of their founding," he says, with a brush of reverence to the words, drawing his hand back, "Each House raised up by a Saint or hero."

She claims he will not be in her debt. He nevertheless sees an opportunity to furbish her with coin in kind.

"I would tell you what I know of them, if it would aid your efforts," he offers, nearly shyly.

Founding, instead. That makes a little more sense. He went to Mars first, then—well, everyone was trying to get there already, and he probably had to do the least work of it all. That actually makes a lot of sense. She smiles, both at the knowledge and at the closeness. She hadn't expected this to be the foundation of their friendship, but she settles in a little more like she's getting comfortable with it all and fixes him with a smile.

An idle gesture at the projected screen of her Omni opens up a blank note document in a separate tab, and a hard light keyboard comes from the bottom into her lap. Her attention is not on any of that. "I think it will, Ortus," she says kindly, genuinely. Like she can think of no better way to spend this time than listening to him talk about the Houses, no matter how long it may take. "At your leisure."

For all the travails of this conversation, for all the weight of what has been disclosed, there is a part of Ortus' heart that thrills with quiet, disbelieving wonder at how swiftly she agrees to listen to his stories. He knows she has reasons beyond pure aesthetic interest, and he cannot say the same is not true of his own motivation, but still. It is not unwelcome.

He smiles back, a faint, tentative, nervous thing, the shape still not easy on his mouth. He clears his throat softly, straightening his spine so that his lungs may move with ease, that the column of his throat will sing true.

"I will begin with the Ninth," he says, with sureness that comes across him all at once, "Last founded of the Houses, built by Anastasia, God's mortal Saint and the first of the Tombkeepers' line..."

And so it goes.

Later, Illarion will look back and think it fitting (and strange) that it took the lizard of all things to reawaken his sense of purpose about a certain black-eyed Emperor.

He'd come over to the mansion in Gaze at Gideon's invitation and made his "parental" visit with the lizard. Had noted, as Tabris had said, that it still echoed a little of self when he was near it--which curdled uncomfortably with his certain knowledge that it was in another necromancer's hands now, and had been for months. That it--he, Shinji-kun--acted self-aware and aware of Illarion's visit (even if only for a little while) put the shrike no more at ease for the rest of his errand.

But eventually, he'd bid his farewells; eventually, he'd found a bone servant and politely requested to speak to the mansion's master. He'd expected, and not been disappointed, to have such an audience materialize nearly for the asking; he had followed the skeleton through the mansion's halls to the door of what, he presumes, must be a study from the outlines he can ((feel)).

He doesn't need a deep breath to steady himself and to take one anyway would be fruitless. He still stands outside that door for the second it would take to inhale, then nods to the skeleton to admit him.

"Salutations, o Emperor, and gratitude that you are seeing fit to speak with me on such notice--"

[ ooc: If other Bone House residents want to have noticed/intercepted Illarion on an earlier part of this errand, be my guest!! ]

"Nice of you to drop by," says God, who has always gotten a kick out of meeting Salutations with Hey. He sits at the desk with its clutter of notebooks and enchanted bone, rubbing a thumb absentmindedly at his temple. There's a tea tray out, with a mug of cold tea abandoned at the corner of the coffee table. There are, at least, no raspberries.

He waves Illarion in and towards one of the more comfortable chairs. His posture is casual as ever, but there is a new degree of focus under the surface, some serious edge which Illarion had not seen from him under the shadow of February's coming storm.

"I've been hoping we could catch up. How was hell?"

A good way to start.

He takes the offered chair, settling into it the way a human would instead of the crouch suited for elven bones. The lack of pomp and ceremony's both expected and, in its way, familiar; it makes him think of the once he'd paid court to the Imperator, and how little they thought of the expected grandeur of the Imperial Presence.

It suited the particular dignity of the Empire's Foundation, but Illarion wonders at it in a god. There were reasons to keep one's distance from the divine, however personable the face It wore. Ritual was one such fence.

If they can't stand on that, the shrike will simply use other means to remind himself to keep his distance.

He gives a huffing almost-laugh at the question. How was hell? Truthfully, I haven't been thinking about it, he doesn't say. Instead: "Fitting, as hell is meant to be. In some ways it is being, hm, disorienting to have left it after so much time.

"I am understanding I have you to thank for the intervention of your Augustine."

There is a lot he could say about Augustine and hell, and none of it he cares to say right now. He cracks a smile at Illarion's good grace about it, and waves off the thanks with that same casual ease. None of it alleviates the underlying tension in him.

"My Augustine," he echoes, as though pleased by the sound of it. Not many people here know that name; he's Patience to most of them. Hell must have been rough. "I'm glad he could help. He's the best I've got... my right-hand man. I have you to thank for getting him back to me in one piece."

There's somewhat Illarion could guess about Augustine and hell, having had his own reciprocal trip through the man's worst nightmares. It's not lost on him this is an opportunity to put some of that experience into better context--even if his primary motive in coming was not to sit here, and feel an odd little frisson of something-like-dismay at the way the Emperor repeats his words.

Some possessiveness is surely expected, of one's right-hand man, of the best one's got. Nevertheless, it disconcerts.

"It is the smallest thing I could do, for those who risked themselves to save me. Nor could I repay you so callously by losing him, when you had taken in my own dear ones in Leviathan's wake.

I am understanding that Kaworu was not well, when he returned. That you took a great part in restoring him to himself. I thank you also for this."

(Even though the gratitude is full warranted, it galls a part of him that he must offer it; it is a reminder that his own foolish last action against the Beast amounted to an abandonment of his post and his own child.)

At this, God gentles somewhat. The hard edge fades from him; he settles in, fingers laced on the table, and tips his head in acknowledgment.

"I'm sorry you were parted from him." He says it with a more genuine gravity, and it is the first thing he's said that has felt, perhaps, fully human. "But I've been glad to have him here. He's a good kid. The others have been glad for the company, too... it's good to see them together."

In that gentleness, Illarion can suddenly envision what drew Paul--fatherless child, lost young man--to the defense of someone like this, someone who needs no defenders in all his careless power. There is something more than ambition and godhood behind the playful everyman front; there is a person, and not the hollow Eyes and Locusts became.

"A great treasure, to have a house so full of children. I am hoping, o Lord, you appreciate them while they are here. They are all of them good." He punctuates the words with a small, sad smile.

"It is in fact on their behalf I have come to ask a boon of you. You kept the lizard for them, yes? Fido?"

This surprises him. He sits back a little, eyebrows quirked up.

"I think the kids are calling him Shinji, now. They got attached, you know?" If there is any greater and more malicious purpose, it does not show in his face; he looks genuine amused, fond. "If you want him back, you'll have to go through them, honestly."

09 . bone house summer

late may | John & Kaworu

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fuck me I missed this

whats up gamers im here with the speedrun strat of troy with pizza

lets fuckin go

LETS GOOO

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cw violence but like. ineffective

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at the heresy hut

cw: physical abuse (referenced)

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head for a wrap?

sounds good to me!

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a family visit | the day of the Shinji-kun Reveal

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