deercountry | Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

Entry tags:

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

Who: Johnny, Daniel, Ortus, Gideon Nav's Exquisite Corpse, Paul, Kaworu, Deku, Harrow, Maybe more?
What: Kidnapping, Forced Adoption, Getting these kids away from the Emperor
When: Shortly after boatgate
Where: The Bone House and Cobra Kai

Content Warnings: Probably references to Murder, Manipulation, Johnny Lawrence.

Prompts and Mingle will be in the comments.

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Paul pivots on his heel as if struck hard in the shoulder, staggered and whirling, seized up in a mirror of Midoriya's compulsion.

"No."

Panic is scrawled across his face as it was in the ruined street where they faced the fiery wyrm, as it was on the cold beach where they clasped hands and swore that the future where Midoriya fell in tatters to the sea would never come to pass, as it was when Midoriya shattered his bones to throw himself at God on the deck of the ship. All he sees is a door closing, the lips of an open grave drawing together over the toothed eye of an insensible universe.

In the handful of steps it takes him to cross the space between them, he feels no closer, his eyes collapsing to cloudless blue luminosity even in those fractions of seconds.

"Izuku-kun-" He reaches for his shoulders, his strong arms, his voice an unbearable, shaken thing that reaches out with him in terrible yearning - and he catches himself short, staring at the blue flames that lick his fingers. He makes a torn, wet sound at the back of his throat and pulls himself back.

"I must not fear," he breathes, trembling, and when he presses the heels of his hands against his eyes it's impossible to tell where the light of one meets the other, "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

The fire dies with every word, the approach to the criticality threshold averted. He doesn't lower his hands when he speaks again.

"She'd kill you," he whispers, harrowed and low, "I can't let people keep dying for me."

Paul's curls catch the air with their movement. His eyes match the fire on his fingers. Midoriya is very familiar with the heat of blue flame, but he doesn't flinch. Danger Sense doesn't need to tell him there is no ill intent. He will not flinch from someone in need reaching for him either. He never has.

He only moves without thinking when it looks like Paul will burn himself. His fingers in their tattered gloves have wrapped themselves around his forearms. He doesn't remember doing it. Paul's litany flows like water attempting to assuage the heat.

"Then think carefully and don't summon a Pthumerian you'll regret. I love you," he says quietly with a ripple of emotion across the disturbed waters. Somehow it feels like the force of a thunderclap.

On a bright summer day, Paul led him out of this house and the darkness of a memory. Now Midoriya takes Paul by the arm (by the hand if the heat will let him) and gently steers him towards the door for some air.

Paul lets Midoriya take his arm, lets his hand slide down to the still-hot but cooling curve of his own hand, lets himself be led. His eyes oscillate in blue-greens, their shade unfixed as he is guided out of this house, expression empty but not blank. It is hollowed, a bare field of ash.

He may never cross this threshold the other way again. When he left Caladan, it had been the same, but he had not felt the doom that hung over them all so certainly then. He had faced the future with courage. He had been willing to believe in the transience of bad dreams. He had believed that the good and the just might not have their victory assured, no, but that it would be theirs if they were clever, and they were strong, and they stood side by side with their comrades-in-arms.

The air tastes of storms.

“I love you,” he whispers, as much a ghost as anything that has ever stalked the shadowed halls at their back, and he wishes that he hadn’t. He wishes that his tongue would cleave to the root and fall out of his mouth, as one wishes when one does not believe in wishing.

“I love him,” he says, and it’s worse, “I won’t regret anything that keeps you safe. Not if the one paying the price is me.”

The last, and the worst, in its helplessness: “I’m not done yet.”

Paul's hand feels like it has just held a hot cup of tea. A fine illusion, as if they can just sit and share one together by a fire to drive the nightmares away. It will take more than that. When he touches him (and he does without hesitation) Midoriya still sees the blood on Paul's hand like an involuntary fever chill. They're not done yet, but that struggle is also a hope.

He leads Paul to the far end of the yard away from the clatter of everyone loading the truck and potential questioning looks about the third person not accompanying them. The air is cooler outside. There is a thin breeze coming in from the sea, and it promises to swell. It carries the warning of upheaval, but it does not yet threaten to cleave the sky in two. It clears Midoriya's head. His goal remains unchanged.

He squares his shoulders and says quietly to the trees at the edge of the property, "You can't pay if you're dead. You've studied the Pthumerians; if you think the Reckoning will see it this way, go ahead and do it. I'll protect you so you can see it through."

He turns and looks at him with the solemnity of someone who knows what it means to experience the fear of death and push forward anyway. "Don't be afraid."

He looks up at Kaworu's window, but distance, sun, and shadow obscure what is in it. He thinks of how he left his mother in tears, how he didn't shed any at all, how the light in his eyes had died.

"I can't tell if he's watching us, but sign to him anyway. Tell him you love him. You didn't before. He needs that."

Edited 2022-08-17 06:04 (UTC)

Paul slips his hand out of Midoriya's soundlessly, folding to his knees where he stands as he did on the beach. He has even less to work with now, nothing but his still sharp fishknife, a single cone of incense, and his own guilty blood. It will be enough. The Reckoning is not a god of subtlety.

"No, he doesn't," Paul says, with matching quiet solemnity, and something in him has given way. He sets out his incense and lights it with a flaring finger, not caring that he's seen to do it, only that the bright arc of pain that runs up his arm adds to the siren's call of his yet unopened veins.

"Neither do you." He traces a scorch circle in the grass around it, a tang of ozone blending with the faint trace of salt in the air. His voice rises, steadily, swelling up with resignation like a bruise. "You think I don't know that this is over?"

The house and everything that was built in it are coming apart, even if it stays standing. He can hear its bones being broken and its sinews being torn. They are shattered and scattering, with everything Paul had thought he had made safe ruined and destroyed. This, them, everything - all of it done, so much dust.

"Look at what I did to him. What I did to you. What I did to everyone else. And you think I should tell him that. I shouldn't even have said it to you." He sits back on his heels and lets his hands fall to his lap, head tipped back to stare up at the blank, pitiless sky. "But I can't help myself, can I? I ruin things. People. It's what I'm best at. Every time I try to do anything else -"

He shrugs. It's off-balance, one shoulder higher than the other. He rolls his head forward, his neck bowed, and he takes a long, slow breath, in and out.

"What do you think I'm afraid of?"

Midoriya, like most Japanese people, was never religious except in a customary, matter-of-fact sense. If asked, he might say he doesn't really profess a religion, or simply shrug. But he's checked his apartment for ghosts and leaves little offerings to large and small deities when he happens upon their shrines. It's just practical to avoid restless spirits and polite to pay respects to local kami.

Normally the shedding of blood is considered pollution and not a suitable offering. This is not a Sleeper preconception, but one Midoriya carried from home. However, Midoriya readily accepts that Pthumerians can operate on a different logic. He's used to the concept of multitudinous gods, each more different than the last.

He balls his hands into fists at his sides and frowns, tight-lipped. He needs Paul strong and ready for anything, not like this.

"...What made you scared just a minute ago," he answers.

He folds his legs under him as he did when kneeling in Kaworu's room. He doesn't face Paul as an adversary, but by his side as a friend, ally, and fellow supplicant. He stares at the little smoking cone giving off its cloying holy scent.

"A while ago, someone apologized for hurting me. I didn't realize that I needed to hear it, to know they cared about me. I... almost didn't get to hear it at all." A tear slips down his freckled cheek as he looks at Paul. "Yeah, sometimes you give someone love or kindness, and it's rejected. Kaworu-kun might not even be looking at us. But please tell him."

The strangled little noise Paul makes is nothing like a laugh. He closes his eyes as Midoriya kneels next to him like he doesn't despise him, ever generous even to his villains, and lets his head roll forward to hang as Midoriya speaks.

"I'm not afraid you'll reject me." Paul produces his ritual knife with a flick of his wrist, a bead of frustration working into his voice. "You should. You both should."

The proper form of this would be to have Midoriya take the knife and inflict the wound, but Paul can see the fight that would come of it with the dull foresight of mundane understanding. Self-inflicted will have to do. He raises the razor sharp blade to the crook between thumb and index finger and rests it there, already biting lightly into yet-unbroken skin.

"I'm afraid you'll go somewhere I can't bring you back from," he says, staring forward at nothing, and then, irrelevantly, unbidden, "At least he wasn't sick."

Paul slits his palm down to the flexor tendons, bisecting the branching loop of the radial artery in a gush of oxygenated blood that spurts obscenely once before it subsides into a torrent that slicks down Paul's upraised forearm and drips heavily on the cone of incense, plumes of cinnamon and iron scented steam rising from the contact between the profane and the divine.

It's then Paul raises his hand, signing with slippery, reddened fingers: I love you.

He knows it intimately. "The same fear I--"

The blade, so true, cuts so easily it hardly seems as if it cuts at all. Paul's hand simply opens of its own accord, and blood is spilling across the deck of a ship as the smell of iron fills the sea air. Midoriya opens his mouth to say something about cutting too deep and immediately regrets it as he tastes it, and he can only see the dark red inside of his eyelids as he hears the gagged protests of the sacrificial victims--

His eyes have been open, and he is kneeling on grass as his head snaps in alarm towards a crack of displaced air. He recognizes the hem of the giant robes. A giant sword hovers as if to harvest the tops of the nearby trees. The Reckoning is a Pthumerian of action, so it is fitting she is prompt.

At this moment, he should make a proper greeting, perhaps bow and clap his palms. All he can do in the feral buzz of his panic is activate the Full Cowl of One For All. Its warmth spreads to fingers gone cold with fear that the one next to him will be taken away again. He grabs Paul's arm despite his claws and opens his mouth in a strangled shout up, up at the helmet lurching against the sky:

"HE'S MINE!" he protests (commands, snarls, pleads) through the red staining his fangs, and he's a coil caught in a surge of rage and pain.

The force of Midoriya's grip and tug throw Paul off balance, pitching on his knees to shore up against Midoriya's side. He doesn't notice the sting of claws under the crackle of lambent energy sheathed Midoriya and the unexpected crash of their bodies. He doesn't follow Midoriya's gaze up, too preoccupied by the explosive, bloody claim that he makes.

It doesn't come as a surprise. Not a real one, when Paul remembers everything that's led to this moment, the things Midoriya has said and done since the ship sank. But it feels like a revelation, some veil twitched back from his own clouded vision.

He's dragged himself this far mechanically, one foot after another, always thinking to the next thing, and the next, and the next, so that the feelings dogging his footsteps could not catch up to him. Now, at the worst time, they do. He kneels, half-fallen, in the shadow of the Reckoning, and all he wants to do is curl himself under Midoriya's arm and close his eyes under the aegis of his protection.

"Hear him, Reckoning," Paul says, much quieter than Midoriya, finally lifting his eyes in shameless entreaty to another god of death. "Hear him and know your price will be paid for what we ask of you. We seek your judgment, laid over that house, against any in it who would harm Kaworu Nagisa, favored of your ill-done sister, her seas fresh on his lips - and I offer you this."

He raises his hand higher. Blood rushes down to his elbow, trickles along the curved muscle of his upper arm. He is shaking, with its loss or with awe, a tiny tremor that makes the droplets on his fingertips dance with reflected light.

"My contrition. My supplication." Fervency wrenches his voice. "Let me pay the debt I owe. Let it be me, and not him."

Midoriya unfastens his grip only long enough to clutch Paul (bleeding, shaking, desperately alive) to him by the waist should they need to leap away. The Reckoning jerks her head in what seems to be a scoff, but only after Paul is done speaking, so it is unclear what at. It is not enough to bring down death, or Midoriya would have sensed it coming. Probably.

The Reckoning drops to one knee with a shaking of the ground and leans down to get a closer look. She sways with more deadly grace than anything her size ought to. Her face is obscured by a veil, but she seems to take in the two ants before her with something more than eyes.

"So much for constancy," she berates in a bold, cutting voice that echoes with her size. "Contrition... What of the contrition of Kaworu Nagisa?" With her free hand, she unfurls two skeletal fingers battlesign-quick. She lowers one, but the other remains upright and expectant. Midoriya's heart despairs, and his vision fills briefly with red before it drips down his cheeks.

"I'm watching Kaworu too." I'm watching him carefully, or I'm watching over him. Both are true. He does not mean to be vague; it's the limitation of his native language. "He's hurting. I need to get him back. Help him try to do better. He's mine too!"

Her helmet turns just slightly to wordlessly consider Midoriya, who involuntarily surges with more power than is strictly safe for him. He can feel it rattle in his joints and jostle his tensed, spring-loaded cords. It chases the fear out of him, leaving nothing but feral, clawing purpose.

She jerks her head back to Paul. "Confess your crimes," she orders sharply.

Paul can withstand the scrutiny of the great Pthumerian. When she strikes the earth to shaking, he remembers the old man of the desert, the angel of the beach, the conqueror wyrm of the ocean come to claim him. He is before the vast, consuming eye of the universe, and he looks back into it from the threshold of a shadowed place.

But she speaks of Kaworu's contrition, and his heart clamors. She turns her gazeless sight to Midoriya's protests, and Paul goes tensely coiled next to the turbulent storm of Midoriya's rippling power inside the encircling anchor of his arm.

(If she touches him, either of them, Paul will fall back across that threshold. He will ignite in retribution, he will make himself a scourge. Black, cold knowledge lays a stilling hand on the back of his neck.)

But she pivots back to Paul, and the future clarifies. He called her. He knew what she might ask, what she almost surely would ask, the sacrifice not complete until she does. He swallows a citric acid scald in the back of his throat, something hot and vital loose in the dark hollow of his skull. Blood trickles from his nose, unfelt, as his palm still pulses in rhythm.

"I confess," he says, tongue heavy, "I confess to sacrilege against my Patron, Mariana, and her domain. To abuse of my power, to domination of others' will, to theft of their freedom. I confess to profaning of the blood," and he hitches in Midoriya's hold with a stuttering inhale. It is slippery as cool grey stone from a faraway sea, a hundred times as heavy.

"I confess to murder, twice over." He won't look away from her, however hard her regard falls across him, as long as it stays with him. "I confess to being a traitor to my House, an oathbreaker. Faithless."

They may as well be two kinds of killing. Jamis, the pirate. The heart of House Atreides. His heart. They jumble together in his thoughts, a roil of guilt and shame and intangible, impossible loss.

His father would have wept to see what Paul did.

"I am at your mercy," Paul says, in a stranger's soft, accepting voice, "I ask for The Reckoning."

"You confessors always make your crimes sound so pretty, your disregard for others and their lives..."

Midoriya bares his fangs. He wanted to look at Paul at murder, twice over, but he will not take his eyes off the Reckoning. Every person closest to Midoriya has told him not to risk himself, knowing that he does. If the Reckoning lays a finger on Paul or Kaworu, Midoriya would do it again, no matter what happens to him. It would be a quick, ignominious end. There is nothing romantic about being dashed to the ground in pieces of red flesh, white bone, and green fabric.

Midoriya and his Patron are fundamentally opposed. Midoriya has not concerned himself with seeking justice or revenge. He is someone who saves others or shows them the right path. He is the hand that reaches out or the one that protects, not the one that punishes. And yet, his intent to save resonates with her own.

"Protector, hear me and obey. You will be an instrument of my justice, thus: Witness Kaworu Nagisa's contrition before the next moon. Humble him with the toil of atonement."

"I will," Midoriya growls, his hackles not entirely lowered, but recognizing a shared goal. The Reckoning curls her raised finger down.

"See it done, or I will. The curse as described will last until the next moon. Place your blood here."

Her fingers loom over them as she offers the pad of her thumb. When they have done so--Midoriya swiping the tar-smell of his blood tears onto it, Paul bleeding enough to eclipse that--she straightens and brings her sword in. Its movement cuts the air like a windmill, and the two boys look about as useless as a knight trying to fight one. She runs her stained thumb along its edge, drawing out a thin streak of her blood. She flips her grip to aim her swordpoint downward, perilously close to the young humans.

Midoriya tightens his hold, but Danger Sense is quiet. He breathes to Paul, "It's all right--"

She drives a third of the thick blade into the ground at her side. The soil near the edge of what John calls his property trembles and drinks the invisible curse like wine spilled on cloth.

When Paul smears his blood over the god's thumb a curtain of lightning falls across his vision, the world eclipsed in brilliance as he drops his shaking, bleeding arm to his chest and curls his hand into a fist. Vessels narrow, blood clots, but there is only so much compensation that even his physiology can make for what now slicks arm and thumb and hallowed blade.

Like a crysknife, he thinks, before she flips the sword and Izuku whispers into his ear. The universe hangs suspended between the two, divine retribution and mortal solace.

The blade strikes home, and so does the thunder.

Paul takes a shattered breath like the blow split his chest and not the starveling earth, curving around his leaping heart as silver pours from his stunned open eyes. The curse shivers ephemeral at the edge of his sight, ripples outward and onward into a future bisected. The moisture of his eyes, of his lips, weeps with the faint sting of acid, a brackish tide drawn forth by the gravitic tug of the Pthumerian's will.

"It is done," her voice says with his throat, and then he slumps against Midoriya's side bonelessly, teeth gritted against a strangled whimper as a cascade of sparks tumble agonizingly down every tender nerve in his mouth. It feels like catching a star on his tongue and swallowing, white hot annihiliation boiling in the stains of his guilt, pain welling up from soul more than body.

But nothing bleeds besides the slit wound on his palm as the shadow of the Pthumerian's sword falls across them as she pulls it free.

Edited 2022-09-05 14:10 (UTC)

He's a Warmblood, this world's blood magic version of being Quirkless. He doesn't have anything to experience the effects of the curse being enacted on his behalf. He's already given away its best surge of power--or lack thereof--the inert quality that makes it ideal for treating Corruption and Beasthood.

As on the beach, someone speaks in another's voice, but it is not an Omen. It is Paul. Midoriya bends more securely over Paul, then curves them both into a bow, their hair nearly touching the grass. Those that would be superhuman are so small in front of the armored god.

"Thank you," he growls fiercely.

Then she is gone as quickly as she appeared, and air rushes to fill the void she left behind. The deep slit she left in the ground yawns balefully up at the sky. Finally, Midoriya disarms his Quirk. He sits up and supports Paul's weight against him. Amidst the uncoiling shock of relief, he attempts to grasp Paul's hand to stem the blood flow. His own face is smeared with rust.

"What happened to your voice?" he gasps. His own is thin and tremulous.

Paul numbly allows Midoriya to staunch the wound in a grisly echo of a handclasp, the silver draining out of his eyes like water from a cracked vessel. He swallows thickly, dreading what might slough down his throat from the wrecked throb of his mouth. He barely wants to skim his awareness over it; he cannot feel anything else so keenly.

"Punishment." No blood pours out, no greasy smoke. His voice is fractured and shivering, but it's his, and the agony is losing its keenest edge. "Part of the price."

All of him is shivering, a mimicry of shock. He shouldn't be so affected by the volume of blood lost so far, but he can already trace this deeper than the flesh. The fingertip of a god brushed under his chin, the faint candle flame of her might passed across his vision. His soul aches, jarred violently against its ephemeral moorings. He knows without knowing that he has been passed over by something far worse than this.

"It's done," he echoes, cold slicing down to his bones, exhaustion welling up in the gaps left behind. "Nothing will happen to him. She showed me." His hand spasms in Midoriya's with pain he doesn't feel. "It's time to go."

"Breathe," he reminds him, mind running its fingers past pages on signs, symptoms, and procedures. "You're safe."

A hand in his hand, and it is slick with blood. Midoriya works with his other hand to get what he needs from his belt. Gloves off, disinfectant ready, all of it passes in sharp relief. It should be a blur in light of how tiredly Midoriya slouches like a puppet with strings cut, but he will remember every bump of woven bandage under his fingers, every warm drop of paleblood daubed away. And he will not fall, supporting the shuddering one next to him with his weight. This is the one wound he can tend to out of so many wounds unseen.

He loops an arm around Paul and hauls him up, ignoring the weakness in his own legs. He guides him to sit in the back of the truck, where he pulls a blanket from the baggage and wraps it tightly around him.

He wipes Paul's face clean. (He's careful with the delicate skin under Paul's eyes.) Water is in order, and a steady arm--one that isn't his. Midoriya is too connected to everything that's shaken Paul, and his face is still streaked with his own warmblood besides. These are the thoughts that clip mechanically past each other as he resists the urge to put an arm around someone in need.

As Midoriya cares for his wound, Paul watches in numb quiet, as attentive to each detail as the other boy is, and he thinks: is this safety?

The question echoes in the sting of disinfectant he bears without a flinch or a sound, in the sponging away of blood, in the way he is raised up and carried and settled. He closes his eyes when Midoriya cleans them, still shivering, but the shivers have shuddered to nothing by the time he is done. Paul doesn't open his eyes to watch him depart, shuffling to the far side of the truck. Others join them, the last departures from this shadowed house, and the truck rumbles to life underneath them all.

The rattle of metal, the thump of wheels on a road not meant for them. Paul pulls the blanket closer around himself. He's still cold, under the summer sun, cold enough not to feel the pain in his palm or inside his chest.

Perhaps that is what safety is, this lifeless distance between himself and everything that he might feel. He hovers somewhere above himself, observing his own skin as a stranger, and he wonders if it hurts.

He opens his eyes and looks at nothing, and that is how he stays, for a while.

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Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

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cw: gore description

cw: gore description, psychological horror

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