August Catch-All (open & closed starters)

[martyrofduty]

who: Pyrrha Dve | Duty & others
what: Various August happenings
when: All month
where: Bone House, Outpost, Staging Point, Around Trench

content warnings: see individual starters

Comments

Imagine Meeting You Here | Closed to Mercymorn

[martyrofduty]

CW: Sewers, body horror, necromantic nonsense, Mercymorn

Pyrrha could have come down under the city anytime once she started hearing rumors that hinted at Mercymorn's return, a longer stay. However, whether taken as the Saint of Duty or herself, she is easy to find, and Mercymorn hadn't come for her. So it waited and waited until—

She could ask John, but it's an easy reason to encroach on Mercymorn's territory. After all, if she's healing strangers, surely Pyrrha is welcome to treatment. Even Gideon if he couldn't handle it himself for some reason. Her gait is natural, slow and steady, neither rushing nor hesitating. Soft and quiet without being unnaturally silent. There's enough sewers to explore for a long time. Possibly all over the city, if properly mapped. If stable.

She could walk down here forever or until the patch of rubbery skin spans her whole body and turns her into one of the monstrosities that's been attacking people. Unless someone helps her. Who oh who could that be.

[acidjail]

Ten thousand years is a long time to learn the strike of another person's footsteps up and down echoing narrow corridors. Those alone wouldn't be sufficient for recognition, out of the sea of all of the available local humanity, except that there are only ten bodies in all the long span of the universe that have been beyond her ability to perceive.

Of course God sends the Saint of Duty after her. He always has been so terribly avoidant.

For all her staying out of sight, perhaps she always knew this to be inevitable. The walls of every tunnel that spirals closer to her central node are inscribed with paranoic thoroughness with spit and blood alarm-warding, miniature cell culture constructs latent underneath the pooled brackwater filth. Nothing more overt, her usual punishing trapworks set aside.

Mercymorn is well aware of what this Saint will tolerate in pursuit of prey. Better to be neat about it. She straightens the front of her dress and smooths back her tightly knotted hair before she steps around the lip of a long tunnel at the other end of where her fellow Saint has just arrived.

"What," she says, in a vicious, acid-etching trill, "Do you want?"

[martyrofduty]

Pyrrha doesn't immediately say anything. Instead she checks out how Mercymorn looks. Honestly, she's looked better, but given what last happened to her, Pyrrha doesn't begrudge her choices. She would have let her go longer, but needs must. There's a long slow breath as she knows the conversation that will come. Not the one Mercymorn expects. No, battle would involve moderately less screeching.

They're stupidly far apart from each other. Mishandled could go far worse than any injury or death on her part. "Your help," Pyrrha says. "He didn't send me." There's a chance, after this many years, Mercymorn will take her at her word for it. Duty's never hidden his reasons. Hasn't needed to. Has more honor than that. Pyrrha's lying with every breath she doesn't announce herself, but it's an old familiar lie, one she wants greater understanding of the conversation before breaching.

The foreign patch of skin on her back dampening her shirt reminds her they're on a timer.

[acidjail]

“Oh, does it matter?” Mercymorn bursts out, her composure already taken out back and shot, and there is an awful moment where the Saint of Woe, once Joy, looks poised to stamp her foot and fly into a rant. She does not.

(The waters do not stir, so slow is the blossom of her germlines, thalergy signatures tucked alongside the existing life that percolates in this fetid nutrient broth.)

“When have you ever been anything but tediously, unflaggingly his creature? Even if he didn’t send you – which would be ugly even for you, if it were a lie, so suppose I believe you – what is the difference?” She is more resigned now than upset, a bracing resignation, a shoring up in preparation. She has no rapier, no net. She does not need them. She has never needed anything but herself.

“What do you want help with, then? I’m quite busy, so – chop, chop.”

[martyrofduty]

"I didn't want you dead after you killed him, and I don't want you dead now," Pyrrha says, implacable in the face of Mercymorn's complaints. That should have clued in both Mercymorn and Augustine, but their emotions were too riled up and focused on the wrongs done to them and the wrongs they'd done. The reminder allows Mercymorn more time to think. John didn't give her that.

If John had returned five or ten seconds later, if Pyrrha had gotten to speak, and if he had heard those words along with everyone else in the station, perhaps no one else needed to die. Everyone's timing was shit.

"I'm infected," Pyrrha replies. Slowly, telegraphing that she's not reaching for a weapon, she pulls the collar of her shirt down to reveal a rubbery patch of skin on her chest, resting above her lungs. It's not painful, and Pyrrha has avoided touching it or anything else that would pass the sensation on to John. "I need you to cure it."

[acidjail]

Mercymorn has a whole host of rebuttals quick to hand for Duty's reminder, starting with the fact that the Saint has ever been single-minded but has never been stupid, except when it came to his women, and so would know the futility of attempting to stand against her and Augustine united, in front of the opportunistic baby and the cursed one, no less - and running all the way to the very likely possibility that whatever fragile equilibrium had existed in the moment could never last, whatever Augustine thought.

It doesn't matter what she tells herself now, when it is too late. She can think anything she has to, for the brief span she is confined to this nightmare, if only to see herself through it. She is very good at that, too.

But then there is the revelation, and rebuttals die unspoken. She blinks at it, exaggeratedly, huge, sweeping blinks, and despite herself, she steps forward. What lies nearby lies still.

"Impossible," she says, for spice, since it clearly is not, "You ought to be able to heal it, or unravel the curse. When did this happen? How did you let this happen?"

[martyrofduty]

Pyrrha watches Mercymorn carefully. The next revelation far more shocking. Pyrrha has already proven herself, she hopes, with Mercy's tacit acceptance that they remember the same night, that the person she is speaking with, the person who cannot heal themself of this illness, was there.

"I cannot," she reiterates. Not because of Trench and its unusual influences. Because even in her necromancer's body, Pyrrha has never been able to do everything he can. "It's been a little over two days. I let it happen, Mercymorn, because I could not prevent it."

Pyrrha pauses, a long pause by most standards but not for Duty, not for Gideon, not even anymore for her. "It's me, Mercymorn," Pyrrha says, "it's Pyrrha."

[acidjail]

Mercymorn halts. She takes a deep, shivering breath, and her eyes search a face she has known for millennia for the eyes she expects to be there.

"It can't be," she says, in a small, closed voice, a chamber cell of grief. A useless, pointless utterance. She has seen the failed project. She has witnessed the havoc this place has played with souls and their housing. She has, herself, known a parting, and perhaps it is that which brings forth the billow of smoke from over her heart, that which bursts forward in a pink blaze of gleaming wings as it flings itself heedlessly at the body that once held the Saint of Duty, and does no longer.

Pyrrha! cries a bright, joyful voice, as the butterfly flits about her head, Pyrrha! Pyrrha! Pyrrha!

Mercymorn's feet move beneath her in swift, scissoring steps, cutting the distance between them into fractions until she is looking up at Pyrrha with a pinched, wounded expression, that of someone being very brave about a terrible ache in their stomach.

"The glasses," she says, abruptly, with an awful hitching hiccup, "Oh, you brilliant bloody fools."

[martyrofduty]

Pyrrha's heart aches with joy upon seeing Cristabel, even in this new and different form. Augustine and Alfred. Mercymorn and Cristabel. Had Gideon arrived as a squid, instead of her, would she be his omen? Would they be together again? Or would that fail for the same reason she's lived for so many years. Pyrrha has already haunted Gideon's head, alive and conscious and aware. Perhaps too alive for this sort of reunion. It doesn't work the other way. Gideon is not her omen.

That's only for her. Pyrrha reaches one hand up to offer Cristabel a perch. Cristabel, she thinks fondly, I have so missed you.

Her attention remains, as ever, on the less predictable Mercymorn. Perhaps more aptly, unpleasantly predictable. Pyrrha nods in recognition to Mercymorn's deductive. "Yes," she confirms. Sunglasses were a flimsy disguise but the only one she had time for. It wasn't like Gideon kept contacts the color of her eyes in their quarters.

Human Hoards | Closed to Nico, Yuan, & possibly D

[martyrofduty]

CW: possessiveness, imagined injuries

More than ever, Duty is glad Sleepers need less sleep. Between construction and hunting and diving to the ships and helping people get cured of the curse that briefly hit her and more and more people he knows being in danger, there still isn't enough time. He appreciates John generally sticking behind his bone walls around their house. He appreciates how many of his people can frequently be found or seen passing through the staging point.

It leaves him a little distracted while training Nico that night. Nico is the one person he can be most sure is safe. Thoughts of the others slither through his mind, and Duty acknowledges the concern as valid. Standard practice, really. Except it's not enough to move on and simply focus on the task at hand. With each attack either of them makes, he can picture someone else with that injury. Oscar losing another hand. Billie losing his eyes. Falco losing his head. Yuan losing—

For half a second Duty wonders if he's seeing a hallucination because no sooner does he imagine a knife thrown through Yuan's heart than the man appears behind Nico. Duty's stance changes, ready to ignore any injury Nico might do to prevent an attack Yuan has been waiting for. A foolish place for it, but so is a monster squid raging in front of a group of hunters in Prufrock.

He blocks Nico's next move out of instinct, the kind of thoughtless technique lyctors are used to, and holds up a hand. "Yuan!" Duty calls out, loud enough to cross the distance but quiet enough not to carry too loudly.

[xiaoxiuya]

Shen Yuan would have been content to watch in silence, his back to a convenient wall and his hands tucked into his sleeves like the dignified immortal he'd once pretended to be, but when Duty stopped his practice bout to call out to him, what could Yuan do but come over? He stops just out of sword-point range, greeting Duty and the young man who'd been sparring with him with a polite little bow.

"Boss," he says respectfully. "Did you need me for something?"

[umbraportation]

Keeping up with his sword skills is very important to Nico, so every day some sort of practice happened. Whether it was on his own, or he went toe-to-toe with one of his sparring partners. Pyrrha was always an interesting opponent. She clearly had a great deal of experience and unique weapons.

However, the teen can tell that each time their weapons clash, there's a distraction in Pyrrha. It's that very observation that meant Nico could tell the exact moment Pyrrha's guard dropped entirely. Rather than follow through with his attack, the surrounding shadows seem to bend towards the demigod and swallowed him up. He reemerged from another shadow a short distance away, sword held lightly in his dominant left hand.

"You're too distracted." The statement comes out as a slight complaint, only because Nico doesn't want to end up hurting Pyrrha like that. Upon his face is a deep frown as he looks from his opponent to the other individual that's stopped nearby.

CW: obsessive worry

[martyrofduty]

Despite getting someone else's attention, defense is automatic. Duty rotates, ready to meet any attack Nico continues to make. He isn't hugely concerned about the distraction. He's fought under far worse circumstances. He's trained soldiers under worse. Even if he got hurt, there's far worse than temporary injury.

"Distracted," Duty acknowledges, "Not too much." With someone else, he might have pushed an attack and forced that point home. He's had to, under far worse. It's Nico, not a herald, not Wake, not any number of threats he's faced. An enemy doesn't care, but Nico is far more than that.

He glances back toward Yuan, politely waiting. If Nico tests him, Duty is ready. He's always ready, and now, with everything going on, anything could attack in a moment. Something far worse than friendly sparring, and Duty's ready for that too.

"Wait here," where Duty can see him, where there's the safety that comes from being present to face any threat, "Soon, I can accompany you back." Soon very much isn't now. Nico's threats may not be as personified as Yuan's, but he too could all too easy get injured, killed, taken.

[xiaoxiuya]

...Okay?

Well, okay then! "If that's what you want," Shen Yuan says agreeably, with a small bow of his head. He glances over at the young man Duty's been sparring with, giving him a small but friendly smile as he adds, "Your opponent's quite skilled. Maybe I should be taking notes while I wait."

Go on, introduce them. Surely only positive things will come of it.

[umbraportation]

Nico doesn't attempt to make another attack, not when they're merely sparring. Had he been fighting for real, he wouldn't have hesitated to strike an enemy down. For now he merely takes a few steps closer with a frown.

At the retort, he raises an eyebrow. "Is that so?" It's clear from the tone of his voice that he doesn't quite believe that. Maybe Pyrrha's body would have moved automatically, but her mind had drifted away as the man had come within sight.

The teen turns his attention to the man at that remark. "If you want. I don't have a problem with that." Nico is used to being watched while sparring is happening, the demigod camp has an open ring where newbies are taught to use a sword.

[martyrofduty]

Duty inclines his head toward Nico. Neither proves their point in the pause. If it comes up another day, another time, another moment, perhaps one shall be proven right. Until then, it's like any other sparring.

Duty closes the gap the rest of the way with a couple steps. His rapier and spear work together. Even at close range, the spear in his off hand gets its use. In ten thousand years, he's fought with them at every range imaginable. This exchange comes without break. Any distance formed gets the spear's reach until swords fill the gap. He pays their audience no mind and keeps the session as long as usual. The rest of it comes without break, a sprint and a marathon both.

He steps back with a nod. "Good work," he says. Duty would prefer Nico attacks him when he's distracted; it's good practice. Distractions can come at any time. There are others to do that, however. No need to demand it when Nico doesn't want to.

He motions to their audience and introduces them. "Shen Yuan, meet Nico di Angelo," he says.

[xiaoxiuya]

Duty's very skilled as well of course, to the point that Shen Yuan finds himself seriously wondering what he's doing on the construction team. But that's not really any of his business, and even if he were to let his curiosity get the better of him, he certainly wouldn't ask in front of a student. He smiles at Nico instead, glancing over his weapon and clothes as he greets with him a, "Nice to meet you. Are you on the outpost crew? I'm not sure I've seen you around before."

A Clean Slate | Closed to John

[martyrofduty]

CW:

Her body moves gently in shallow water, pushed then pulled. The tide is strong, and Pyrrha lashes her arms ahead of her into the sand. Thick strong fingers dig into the sand underneath the water. Lean ropy arms covered in scars drag the rest of her forward, head, torso, all her remaining legs. The tide pulls on her, and her shaved head digs into the sand along with her hands. Another few inches and another.

Her elbow clunks into something soft but firm next to her. Her head turns to look that direction. A few feet farther out to sea, a curly head bobs in the water. Pale curves glow in the light up his shoulder. Memory foggy, Pyrrha fits her arm beneath him and matches her hand to the print. It's her hand print. Whatever else she's forgotten, just then, could flood the sea, but this man is hers. Gently, she lifts his hand to a matching mark over her collarbone to her shoulder. They belong together. They are an us.

Though drawing herself onto the beach proper already takes all the energy she knows, Pyrrha refuses to leave him behind. In one ragged motion, she drags him with both her arms as high as she can. Then she pulls herself up the beach. It's an awkward inefficient series of movement. Growling, Pyrrha wraps her arm across his back, her hand gripping his his side, and pulls with her other arm. All her legs slink up the beach, round cups pressing hard into the sand. They propel her further up the beach.

When the water no longer has enough pull to carry them to sea, she collapses facedown against the sand. Something clinks against her back as she does so. Heavy footsteps grow fainter across the sand. Her eyes close. One hand remains on her person, whoever he is. Whoever she is. The water and calls of animals on the beach lull her back to sleep.

cw: vague NtN spoilers

[necrolord]

He remembers this.

Through everything, he'll always remember the water. John Gaius comes awake blurry and slow, coughing up brine, fumbling with the fact that he has hands. He closes one over the curve of her shoulder, up the line of her arm. Her body is warm; she's alive; for a long moment he can't manage anything more complex than holding onto her and getting water out of his lungs. He's never liked the water in his lungs. (Someone else did, but—)

When he's finished, he levers himself up to his knees in the sand. He raises his head, water still trickling through his hair to his eyes, and when he tries to brush it away he only smudges his face with sand as dark and fine as soot and cinders. He crinkles his brow at it, stilled breathless with remembering.

Not for long. The tide is coming in, the waves curling and crashing louder behind them. Something is brewing. They should get up the beach. (He can half-remember her helping, carrying him, but she wouldn't have left the water for him— or—)

"Good morning," he says to the sleeping person under his hand, which isn't right. He is abruptly aware it isn't right, and alarmed at himself for not having remembered. The world shifts into place, and he shudders a breath, tightens his clumsy hold. "Up and at 'em, Pyrrha."

[martyrofduty]

She wants to sleep for a week, lounge about doing nothing for a few days, and perhaps then something light and fun—cooking dinner, playing cards, shooting things. Between one breath and the next, Pyrrha remembers how little of that she scrabbles for, how much there is to do (what it is, no, no she doesn't know, but she knows it needs to be done), and with the jarring certainty that time has passed. She doesn't know how much time, but Time.

Something tickles between her shoulder blades as she moves, and Pyrrha tilts up on one side first. It plops into the wet sand, and her hand grips it tight along with sand grinding into her skin. One breath, that's all she gives herself. One knee, one foot, one hiss of breath, and Pyrrha stands in an eerily familiar and unfamiliar world. This is far from the first time she's watched up on this beach. Swam up on this beach? None of them have been like this. Together, with him.

"John," Pyrrha says his name like finding a piece of home, "you need some help there, buddy?" Her eyes, brown with red crackles like flame, glint mischievously. She goes no further, shows no fear of the tide or the waves or the ocean or the storm. She's solid and firm, and they're making it up this beach together every step of the way or not at all, no matter how far into the depths that drowns them.

[necrolord]

"I'm doing great," he lies, as he he tries to get up on his knees in the sand. There's a lot of swaying involved, and he has to catch himself on her arm. "Fuck. This is— this is, what— four?" No. No, he's crossing it with... no, not four. Gideon, Paul, Pyrrha. He remembers the knife to his throat, the blanket for his shoulders, and now the steady heat of her arm. "Four, for me. Four fun beach trips."

It's all settling into place. He lets it, and focuses on getting upright. It might not be an elegant trip home.

[martyrofduty]

Once he's standing, Pyrrha wraps her arm around him to hold them side pressed against side, like one oddly shaped squid with their eight limbs between them. Zero fucks to give about anything else just then. Pyrrha gets them on their way up the beach, mind slowly tumbling over beach trips, with memories imposing and superimposing themselves.

It's the first time she's washed up with someone; she's sure of that. "One," Pyrrha says, and she remembers fresh fruit and memories leaking off her. That's how she met... someone important. Her kid? She has a kid. "Two," she reaches up to trace John's brow and feels his eyes whole and hale in their sockets. A bullet in each eye. Another bullet with his name on it, but it isn't for him. "Three," Pyrrha says, and she's tossed up on the beach, spit out of the ocean. Alone is no way to be, and everyone needs a partner. She glances back at the water, amused that for all the rage it may hold, that third time—the charm?—is also an act of kindness.

That leaves... "Four," Pyrrha says continuing to see them up the beach to the boardwalk, her body moving on instinct down a path they have walked together before. She doesn't remember much of the specifics, other than attention returning again to his eyes, but it's a way home, wherever it is, something she can follow. She declares, "We're doing great," and means it.

[necrolord]

He exhales a wet and clumsy laugh, and leans heavy on her as they go. It's a rough walk, but he regains his feet quicker than most. The fug of death won't stick to him. By the time they're up the boardwalk, he's nearly himself again.

There isn't much to say. He never stops touching her for long: a hand on her arm, or at her shoulder, or his fingers seeking the broad flats of her palms. He loses the excuse pretty early in, but she seems willing to let him keep doing it.

It's only once they're home, stumbling in the door to a quiet house and bone-and-marble flooring, that he blows out a breath and releases his grip on her. He does it reluctantly.

"Well," he says, "fun honeymoon."

[martyrofduty]

Her memories keep trailing her, catching up when they pause, and the house is no different, only more intense. Everything sends ghosts of moments her way, coming together not entirely in order but that too isn't so unfamiliar. Like cooking, like fencing, like conversation, they weave themselves together in something that is the bare bones of her. A slight elf, a large presence, stands before her last first entrance to the home, farther than the bullets in the door.

Pyrrha smirks at John and his fun poking at their mutual deaths. "Nothing more attractive than living and dying for what you believe in," she comments, loving a bit more openly and strongly if along the same notes she's always had for him. The details aren't entirely back, but the feeling thrums through her, the feeling that only comes from that kind of action. Her own, certainly, but that's no surprise. John's... was possibly the sweetest gift he could have given her for their bond. Partnership. Devotion. Death.

[necrolord]

That hitches his breathing back into another soft laugh. He looks at her with genuine pleased surprise, rebirth having rendered his expression softer and more open.

"Pyrrha Dve," he murmurs, grave and wondering, "did you just call me attractive? I know I'm not a ten. You can be honest."

With her at his shoulder, he begins to creak their way unwillingly up the stairs. They could both use towels and a change of clothes, at a minimum.