deercountry | August + September Catchall

Entry tags:

August + September Catchall

Who: L Lawliet and YOU
What: A somewhat late August catchall, focusing on event stuff but can include CR logs and slice of life! When September's event goes up I'll add prompts for the month in order to save a bit of space. Please feel free to hit me up on discord at ladylazarus#2235 or plurk at LexiL if you want to plot, wildcards are welcome!
When: Throughout August and September
Where: Various place throughout trench

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Memories, or an event that has occurred or been written, are not quite as fluid as a dream. There's a balance in those cases, when he's behind the eyes of another as both witness and participant, and he's experienced what happens when he shifts that balance.

To seize control is to remember himself wholly and be able to direct events. To relinquish it is to meld with the role more fully, at the risk of forgetting himself. He's not here to change anything, but to survive and perhaps to learn, so he reasons that relinquishing might be worth the risk.

Patience. Left-hand. Augustine... he lets himself feel the weight of the clothes he wears, the drunkenness that warms his skin, knowledge of the right thing to say and the right way to say it.]

To Emperor John Gaius, the Necrolord Prime!

[He drinks until his glass is empty, though it feels like he shouldn't, like he's had enough, like everyone at this table has had more than enough. That's the point; I see, now.

John was trying to rebuff the toast, saying that he wouldn't drink to himself, that he's not so great, that he's not that much of a narcissist. Really, now?

The woman with the rose-gold hair fiercely agrees, going so far as to say that he's the best man who ever lived, and it feels like a concentrated effort between the two of them to pull a boulder back from a cliff. They're working together on something; this is a diversion.]

I'll drink to that.

[But he can't without more wine. They need more wine; he stands to refill his glass and Mercymorn's.]

Edited 2022-09-12 19:26 (UTC)

[ The outward stifled, dolorous placidity of L's momentarily co-conspirator is belied by the gaze she turns up at him as he pours, her wine glasses chiming crystalline against his. Her eyes seethe, lashings of frustration and injured pride across a wellspring of desperation. The gritty, bloody mud of them churns as she lifts the lip to her mouth and drinks deep, in silence.

She had imagined this little domestic drama with Augustine as a useless appendage before. It is not so hard to recall how she had intended to behave, if that had turned out to be the case, more a vicious daydream than a real contingency plan, but even her spite is meticulous. Re-calibrating to the presence of this intruder is hardly more than a ripple in the waves she already must navigate.

(They had all called him John to her, like it meant nothing. How he had spent their faith like scattered, trampled wheat.) ]

I think I wish Cytherea were here. [ She says, flicking her glance to the interloper like a knife. ] But then would have all had to play Who had the hottest cavalier? And you'd say Pyrrha Dve, like you always did, and it would have been horrid, as it always was.

[ This is not how it happened. John did not look at her when Augustine spoke those words, with a halo of half-awed delight about his expression, the exhilaration she recalls from other scant moments where she had deigned to get in on the fun. To let her hair down, in a tousled, touchable dawn-cloud, that his glance lingers on, and it is bitter mercy when he returns to her ersatz brother-saint in renewed solemnity, saying as he does: ]

Is Mercy right, Augustine?

[ Of course she's right. It never changed. But it takes his attention off her, and lets her tip the tiniest of nods to the stranger who half-wears Augustine's face and place, his unwitting understudy. ]

[L's not certain, exactly, whether he's relinquishing his control more to the memory or to the alcohol making his head swim and stretching his stomach. What is certain, here, is that something has gone off-track. There's a ripple, alright, an interloper in what's been written and what's past and what should really be unchangeable, at its core essence.

The edges of his mouth tauten; the edges of his eyes, or rather Augustine's eyes, are strained around the edges. Only for a moment, and then he holds his composure around him like a coat in a blizzard.]

I won't pretend she's not. Pyrrha was hotter than the very fires of Hell.

[John agrees, with a word. L calls him a dog, John slips in a sly dig about his mother, and his eyes have such depth even in drunkenness. L collects the memories of killers' eyes, and his imprinting in this closer-than-close moment is a little too real.

He recovers, punching John in the arm. Maybe Augustine, the way this really happened, did it playfully. There's more bite and follow-through to L's punch, though. However lightly it might land, it's a punch a little too earnest, once again a little too real.]

[ It's a stutter in the frame, like the mechanical hitch between the images in the picture projector John used to shine against the walls of Canaan House when the world was still new, full of their hand drawn slides backlit by a flickering bulb. Here, in the nearer past, there is a flash of startled hurt in John that flits in and out of being, that does not quite fit here. An image out of order. ]

I always thought Nigella was prettier.

[ Her note does not hit precisely on the mark, but they turn to her as they should, murmuring their ready agreement. It disconcerts her, even as the infants whisper to each other so baldly that it was a wonder to her even then that they weren't rumbled by it. The measures she had to resort to had been -

Mercy drains her wine glass. It's a good wine. She wishes that it wasn't as John clears away her glass, then the bottle beside it, then every bottle she might reach from where she sits in a near C-curve of submersion. She allowed it then, she allows it now.

Mercy sets her tranquil face in her hand. She looks at nothing in particular. She looks at the pallid flicker of light against the walls. She waits for the interloper to reach for the next bottle, to raise it in his hand. ]

You’re wrong, Augustine. You still hate Cristabel...you hated my cavalier long before what she did.

[ There is no cue, except the dreamy distance of her voice, and her memory of that biting strike. So pointed; so personal. ]

[L fills Augustine's glass, which he will drink with Augustine's mouth and metabolize with Augustine's liver. He sits behind Augustine's eyes like a tumor on his brain, maybe not malevolent but certainly not belonging in these pages, drinking this wine, punching this god in the arm.

He doesn't belong in a conversation with this pugnacious woman, having done nothing to deserve these accusations over attitudes he has no reason to hold, but oh, it's different for Augustine, isn't it?

He asks, maybe a little too earnestly in his innocence to the matter,]

Do I?

[John said, "This isn’t a conversation either of you have to have. Not now. Especially not after five glasses of wine."

John's probably right, but the path opens in front of him, the tracks of this conversation like a roller coaster he's locked into and can only modify in small, slight ways without risking a total derail.]

More than five, a lot more. Don't judge, let her dig him up again. Do I, Mercy? God help me, I don't think I do.

[And he really doesn't; there's an honest question in his dark eyes, even though he really should hate Cristabel, according to the loose intuitive script they're working from.

She tells him to look her in the eyes and say it, so he goes to her chair, ignores John half-rising as though to discourage him. He bends so that he can look into her oval face.]

Joy, what’s done is done. They’re dead. The crime is punished. I don’t hate Cristabel.

["Say it again," she said, unflinching and unreadable. So he speaks low, probably among the most surprised by the words.]

I don't hate Cristabel. Dear, I barely hate you.

[ Mercy looks into this stranger's long-hated eyes, and she could kill him for this, she could kill him like this. If she could kill the man at her side by getting her hands on him, she could surely do the same to the one leaning over her in brother-Saint's skin. She could do it to Augustine, too, and Gideon, and all their long-dead brothers and sisters.

If Mercy could kill God, she could kill anyone. Sift him out to particulate nothing, a holy mist dissolved to holy absence, and be done with it. Let the memory play out as it might have, and perhaps it ends the same, splayed out in the ignominy of her own pulp.

She knows he'll be able to see it in her eyes, this one. There's something to him of the shadow. It lies glossy and fat between them, the murderous slant of her wild, tumultuous, unbalanced eyes.

She kisses him instead, with all the sudden passion of a slap, and there is not a trace of hesitance in the darting intrusion of her tongue. The ghost of another mouth echoes in the hollow cavern of his.

And if she bites him, the once, with teeth too sharp, she cannot help but be what she is. ]

[He's played his part well, with the grace of trusting his vehicle enough to teach him what he couldn't intuit from the context or their millennia-long history. Looking into Mercy's eyes, though, there's an uneasy notion that he has played it too well, and that she hates him for what it's let him learn about this dinner, these people and this situation.

He's weak for hatred, where he thinks he reads it and sees it. In a twisted way, he's hungry for it, passion that he can access and act on with impunity, especially if the hatred is mutual.

But he has no reason to hate Mercy. He's the one who chose this book; she's the one shepherding him through this bizarre farce of a dinner party. She's the one leaning in, suddenly and sharply, to kiss him, thrusting her tongue in his mouth (Augustine's mouth, he reminds himself, tasting strongly of the wine that has gone to Augustine's head.) She kisses like a viper, strong and swift and with her teeth, and there's a shameful, distant part of him that understands that no amount of tutelage or attempting to explain could ever teach Shoyo to kiss, truly, like L is someone he hates.

It's headier than the wine. Behind Augustine's shameless, practiced tongue that interlocks easily with Mercy's, there's a wide-eyed detective who knows that the bite was a message, specifically, to him, and returning kisses that carry a shadow of something humble, shattered, and full of wonder.

John wants to stop him, and even if this is how it truly happened, it's all L when he turns to mimic the way Mercy bit him on God's own lips. He's not a man reluctantly along for the ride in these moments; he's in the driver's seat, fully, taking another little trophy in the form of several drops of blood, bruising pressure, the thrum of unprecedented, petty victory.

Mercy's approaching, at his back. He makes way for her; again, he got what he wanted.]

[ The stranger has proven his audacity well before the kiss. He has proven he is clever, that he knows what he is about, that he is guided by some purpose she does not yet perceive except as the baleful star that drives his actions. She has known obsessives. She cultivated a House of them, cast in her own image, and her familiarity with the breed long ago soured into knowing contempt. She hates anything a mirror.

She expects him to flinch. She yearns for him to do it, to confirm what she already is certain of, to crumple under the immensity of her loathing. He is a frail, dewy, insubstantial boy, and she is a furnace. He will burn up under her teeth into nothing. He will bend and comply to her will, schooled into obedience, and she will lead them to where failure will not be their end, and be done with it.

She does not expect him to kiss her back.

He meets her like a man held in the teeth of a hunger as wildly wanting as any she has ever known. He comes to her like a supplicant and a challenger, like a bruise pressed hard to the bone, like a blooming poison, like blood and milk. The knuckles of her fists rasp hard against his ribs, fit to bruise, her mouth hot and fervent and ravenous on his.

When he parts from her to lay his mouth on God's like a closed fist, there is nothing false in the unsteadiness of her rise or the gloss on her unfocused eyes. The strap of her dress slides down her shoulder. Hunger yawns in her gut, flushes her with heat, slicks her palms and her lips.

Mercymorn the First takes a great, greedy handful of God's rumpled shirt, and falls upon him like a lioness, lapping at the already closed wound upon his lip. Divine hands clasp her waist (somewhere, a myriad apart, the infants flee) and lift her, the world spinning about them like they are the axis of the universe's rotation, and she is set on the table with her tongue still plunged back near to God's pearly molars.

This is anathema. This is profane. This is the worst thing she could do, slitting herself open with the shattered wonder of these mouths on her own, a profound wrongness that would rip her apart along the seams with its transgression.

She hooks her knees over God's narrow hips, and with her eyes electrically, furiously open, she shoots out a hand to seize the stranger's collar and drag him closer. ]

Edited 2022-10-08 22:21 (UTC)

[L kisses Mercy like there's no one else, because for this moment, she is Hatred incarnate, and he is leaning into the flame, because it deigns to immolate him, because it cares to, because it is not indifferent, because it does not freeze or neglect him.

He'd cling forever, if he could, and the wine, the wine is certainly influencing this, but he dives into the Emperor like a flooded grave and drinks in his blood and his silenced words. He leads Mercy into an amorous straddle and is prepared to retreat, but she draws him closer, and he is, and he is below and between them, tastes a lip, a nipple, a gasp--

And then, his hand is around the Emperor's neck, and the other could go elsewhere for vigorous gratification, but instead joins the first, clenching and squeezing and reaching Augustine's face in a blissful, climactic smile.]

[ The pretense of an embrace lasts for all of a half-punched out breath. What she falls into with the stranger is a clinch, two combatants locked to each other as horned beasts in the season of rut, and Mercymorn rises to the challenge as a shark to chum.

Her hands rove over him like she's searching for weapons, fingers scraping indelicately over taut-skinned bone and hollowed concave expanses beneath the half-tangible illusion of an absent duelling partner. She invades the space between him and God like a crusade, twisting them all round with the mechanical inevitability of a bread hook, until God's heaving chest is at her back and she half-sitting in his lap, half-braced against her toes strained to touch the floor, and the stranger drapes his arms over her shoulders to seek to close the holy column of the throat behind her head.

Mercy hisses at him as she latches onto a fistful of his light (dark) hair and drags him up her firm thigh like a garter belt, the friction a gift and a threat in one, and she jerks his hair back cruelly to bare his own unworthy throat in rebuke. ]

Bad boy.

[ She chides him, sharply, falling on the dip between his clavicle to suck out a bruise, dragging the blunt serration of her teeth across his skin until she discovers, with a mouthful of venous blood, that her teeth are not so blunt as she thought. Her first swallow is surprise, a jerky, inverted gasp. The second is greed, slaking the knife slits of thirst in her own throat, and the third is bliss, a blooming, mindless victory of joy -

The buzzing spiral of soaring panic puts its own hands around her neck. Mercy flashes her eyes open more more to behold, in the corner of the room, an impossibility.

The impossibility flares its dripping, skeletal wings, and Mercy shoves the stranger off of her with great vigor, sliding from God's lap like dropped silk onto bare feet, heels long lost. Her rapier hangs over the back of her chair. The hilt comes to her hand like a lover. Her teeth are bared. They ache in her mouth. ]

Take him and run.

[ There is a hysteric bite to her voice. It brooks no argument or quarter. ]

[It was a shimmering moment in time, feeling the bones pressing together in his fingers, the pounding of his own heart and Mercy's as well as the pulse beneath his palms. Of course it couldn't last, of course he couldn't be allowed to continue; it almost certainly didn't all culminate in a wicked impulse enjoyed with startling, shameful indulgence. With the passion and the heat so high, though, who could blame him for succumbing?

Not Mercy; though she seizes him by the hair and calls him bad boy, her lips, and even her teeth, are more like a reward than a rebuke. He doesn't expect her to one-up his audacity by tearing into him, though, and as her throat fills with his blood (Augustine's? Whose, truly?), he is rigid against her, breath stuttering and sharp as she devours him before the tension draws to a point, releases in a bloom of thought-obliterating violence, and leaves him blinking and panting against a sprig of rose-gold curls.

Then it all comes crashing down, again, and in a flurry of displaced motion he spins to face, full-on, something he believes he's seen before. John's omen, after all, looks a great deal like the herald.

Disoriented, he reaches for John, a fistful of fabric and the haul of a stumbling, dragging several steps, before-

Sunlight. A park bench, with Mercy's fingertips still on the tome between them. He yanks it hastily back, snapping it shut, shifting his position awkwardly so that he can hold it over his lap.

His eyes are as wide as ever. His cheeks are flushed a deeper red than any fever or exertion has ever stained them, only outdone by the blood staining his shirt.]

Edited 2022-10-10 02:22 (UTC)

[ He falls back, and at first it must seem as though she dives after him in pursuit as her legs wobble beneath her and her hands shoot past him to brace herself against the bench. For choosing that instead of his narrow shoulders, she has the pleasure of knocking her knee sharply against the bench's edge and hissing, and that last is enough to send the handful of people at even the periphery of their return scattering.

Mercy's breath is as hard and fast as a bellows as she stares at him, his blood staining her lips and chin, her eyes blown out with the residual horror of the Herald. She still feels the shriek of its death in the bones of her empty hand, still feels the traitorous aliveness of her skin, and she holds his eyes over the abraded patch she wore into his neck by terrible force of will alone.

When she pulls herself back she brings him with her, hooking fingers into his loose shirt and dragging him to his feet with shocking ease, her limbs vital and responsive again as she hauls him from the bench to standing. ]

Walk.

[ She does not wait for an answer before she seizes his elbow to manhandle him towards the nearest shadowed alley. ]

[L's not breathing hard; he's scarcely breathing at all, not unlike a prey animal caught under the gaze of something fierce that kisses with its teeth. His knuckles are white where they grip the book in his lap; he bleeds, blithely, all over his clothes.

There's a stifled yelp when she pulls him up by his shirt, and he stumbles, because he could use his arms for balance, but his hold on the book is an unbudging priority.

It's like moving a scarecrow, both due to his insubstantiality and his tendency to trip a bit over his own still-wobbly legs. The alley is at least out of sight, but is it also out of frying pan and into something hotter?

Nothing more so, he thinks, than his burning cheeks.]

I didn't know, that it would-

[The explanation might sound fumbling and half-hearted, because well, it's only true insofar as L didn't know he would be Augustine, didn't know they would try to seduce the Emperor together. It would probably go over better if his participation hadn't been so obviously active and enthusiastic.

He's not sorry; he realizes there's no lie he can tell to make it seem like he is.]

[ L's wobbling excuses are cut short when Mercy wheels on him in the alley, twisting her grip on his arm as she crowds him up against the wall and seizes his soaked collar beneath the wound to drag him down closer to her eye level. She can sense the whole state of him, the shamelessness of his blushing stammers and attempts to cover himself, coy as a new bride. ]

I don't care what you didn't know. [ She grits out, with the rasp of fine sandpaper. ] I care about what you did know.

[ It's a filthy, sickening display. Her tongue slips from her mouth to her lips, darting and red. Her tumultuous wet-rust eyes bore into his, no less a haze than they were in the dream. ]

You knew him. You knew what to say, how to behave - you knew, and you will tell me how, and then you will tell me why you hate him.

[ She yanks him closer, showing the serration of her teeth when she bares them in a tiny, tight spasm of a smile, curved as a scalpel and twice as sharp. ]

Don't be shy. You certainly weren't before.

[ Inside of L, the first vanguard of her unknown invasion seeks to claim territory. If L's flesh cannot fight her spores off, he will begin to feel the fluttering clench of excitement low in her belly. ]

[His dark eyes are steady. The marble gloss of idiocy seems to have dropped away at some indeterminate point, leaving something sharp and clever that's thinking very rapidly at this juncture. They're performing calculations, attempting to determine how much of a threat Mercy poses to his life, the pieces missing from the scene he witnessed, the name that was forbidden to speak in the Emperor's presence because it was just too holy.

Not Mercymorn's. Did she love him, or despise him? Some mixture of the two, some similar heady sentiment to the one that tarnished the kisses she'd shared with Augustine and, by extension, the spying interloper?

Were he aware of Mercy's vileblood spores, already prevailing against an undernourished and under-rested immune system, he might be struck by the irony.

The highly deliberate front of resolved composure catches at that unexpected lift below his navel. His eyes constrict fretfully around the edges, because while he doesn't always know what's right, he generally can tell what blatantly isn't.

When he speaks, his voice sounds like something self-possessed and calm fed through a prism, distorting and scattering little pieces of the effect he intended.]

Strong personalities sow discord naturally. It can't be surprising that he'd have disagreements everywhere he goes.

[But not with just anyone. L's largest advantage is often that he can pass for no one special, a strange shabby human unworthy of a second glance or even passing remembrance. No one like that would draw John's notice, of course, let alone his ire, and certainly not over something like a "disagreement."]

Edited 2022-10-13 05:39 (UTC)

[The queer, slit smile remains on Mercy's lips as she twists her hand in the stranger's collar, drawing it into a half-knotted noose that shields his seeping wound from the unkind air even as it tightens close enough to hint at a replication of what he had dared to do to her Emperor, her God. Her eyes flash like a wildcat's in the dark, coiled for the pounce, their haze receding at the prospect of this puzzle.

The growing thrill in her has as much to do with sensuality as the clashing violence of their kiss did with love. The stranger breathes, and there is a new thing in Mercy that tracks the barely there scattering of his voice with a rapt wonder of hunger.

She feels it. She feels something, through the clouding oppression of her sunken soul.]

If you've had disagreements with him, you know very well that I could turn you into so much vapour, if I wished it. I could sift you into component parts, put each of them into a jar, and ask them all in turn the questions I am asking you until one of them saw fit to answer me.

[Half-musing, half-threat, but all of it said in a heated, nearly joyous flush of her own, her cheeks better pinked (or greened, as it were) than they've been since she first awoke on this terrible shore. She digs the nails of her other hand into his arm lightly, just enough to tease worse.]

But I hate to waste anything I can use, and I hate to be untidy. [Her tone turns reasonable all at once, level-headed and sensible.] But perhaps I begin too broad.

You know my name. I would like, very much, to know yours.

[L doesn't blink, doesn't swallow, even as the drenched red fabric of his shirt constricts closer around his neck. The advantage of being a Paleblood is the deceptiveness of it, the notion that one could easily be passed for a Warmblood until the moon is out, but that's not exactly going to get L out of this situation, and he knows it.

There's another question, of course, that being: does he actually want to be out of this situation? The way Mercy looks at him and breathes, the way she hungers and listens, make him eager and willing to stay, whatever the danger.

He nods, just twice, enough to show her that she is understood, and he is not flippant.]

I know what a necromancer can do. A Lyctor, especially.

[And something about that seems open-ended, as if he really does want to see what that would look like, all those parts and something willing to talk. Finally, his wide eyes blink in response to the dig of her nails into his scrawny arm.

A vision flashes through his mind, her rose-gold hair spread against gravel beneath them, the forceful, rhythmic dig of it against her back and his knees. Either he's blushing more deeply or it simply isn't possible, at this point.]

I know your name.

[He confirms it quietly, as something forbidden, but mine isn't real.]

Mine's Lazarus Sauveterre.

[He gives as good as he's given anyone else in this world, a false name with a literal meaning. Consciously, he does his best to reclaim decorum and synthesize the tense hitch in his stomach with slower, more even breathing. It's strangely difficult.]

[Mercymorn brightens further, the benevolence of her approval well-tempered with the malign drive that consumes her. She looks at him like a pupil being coaxed into the correct answer to a problem, and her the indulgent teacher - a way she certainly never looked at Harrowhark.]

Lazarus Sauveterre. [She rolls it over her tongue like it's as sweet as his blood.] I am Mercymorn the First. I was the Saint of Joy. I am the Saint of Woe. I was the second of God's Saints to ascend - I was his fist and his gesture, his blood and his bones - and I have sinned terribly against him.

[She pats his arm with the side of her thumb, a tiny, slippery motion of conciliation. The flush of blood in his wan, hollow cheeks is impressive, since she imagines he has so little he may spare, and it is that thought which presses the back of one bony little knuckle against the wound on his neck. It seals shut at her command, although it gives her a stubborn little pang of displeasure.]

And it takes a great deal to get my attention. [Her teeth show as her smile widens, the canines overlong, ridging on all of them more serrated than they were.] But you have it.

What did he do to you, hm? What would make you take such a risk with a Lyctor, if you know what any of us might do to you for it?

[Even when L was actually a child, he struggles to remember being regarded this way. He can't tell if it's playful and gentle, or ridiculing and cruel. Either way, it makes him uneasy. She introduces herself in so many words, he he stiffens when she reaches for his arm, expecting more pain, but when her hand travels toward his neck, she heals him with just as much ease as the emperor had when restoring his hand.

Lyctors are puzzling, terrifying, and humbling. A knit in his brow, he stiltedly nods silent thanks, still absorbing all of her titles and that little hint that her deeds make her anything but his foe.

Both saints and sinners, in their relative and complicated ways. He cants his head, his hollow gaze lingering long on her sharpened canines.]

I can suffer a murderer, but not a tyrant. I believe it's always come down to that.

[The word tyrant troubles her, saps some of her dark mania. An old spike of mingled hurt and grief and inward turned reproach, a scar that aches at any change in the proverbial weather. She lets her knuckle stay nestled against the thready throb of his pulse as she sheathes her teeth and swallows another dilute wash of his blood.

It's not as soothing as it was. She tightens her grip in his collar with a damp squelch and gives him a little shake by it, then releases him. There is a still-clean stretch on the side of his shirt, and she drags her hand down it, painting it with red already darkening to rust, and there's something still to savour in the prominence of his ribs. She dries the rest of her hand by wrapping the hem around her fingers before she pulls them away, stained but not slick. She finally pops her knuckle from his throat, and some magnetic whim pops it into her mouth to suck the last sticky remnants from.

She never breaks eye contact. He does have her attention, and her attention is a relentless thing, whirring like malevolent gears.]

So you'd knock him off his throne - or keep him from climbing up one. [She muses, a neat line tucked between her brows.] What a thing to say to one of those who helped build his first.

But then again, perhaps I have already given myself away to you...recklessness invites recklessness.

[L can't help but notice the word's affect on Mercy. He's keen and attuned to everything regarding the Emperor, after all, and so the minute changes in her expression scarcely go unnoticed. For a few moments, he wonders if he will be impaled or crushed for his insolence, given that reaction. How, and why did he dare to call John a tyrant in front of one who would seduce him so passionately?

Well, that's simple. I was easily accomplice to it all, in spite of feeling no such loyalty or dedication.

He stands, steady and supple as an autumn reed against some bitter chill, as she drinks his blood again. She seems to dislike it now; he does not flinch as she shakes and releases his damp shirt and the lanky, scrawny, utterly unremarkable human inside of it. He does not break eye contact with her; he does not let her know or even suspect that, while frail in body, he he is also weak in spirit and resolve.]

For one who helped him build, weren't you... eager?

[He seems to struggle to settle on that final word, considering others.]

To dismantle it all, I mean. You seemed...

["Eager", of course, but there are other words he wants to say.]

There was a desperate passion to your desire, to dismantle him. I admired it; perhaps that is the recklessness that you perceive.

[It was less a new aversion to his blood than her own unhallowed appetite for it, and worse yet, some atavistic compulsion to touch, to mark. To leave the imprint of her fingers feathered over him like he has left his own unexpected mark on her. She wants to slide her hands up to circle his neck and bring it back to her, an unfinished itch of a thing not quite finished.

She has always found a certain pleasure in self-denial. And she wasn't lying about hating waste. You simply don't eat a man like this all at once.]

It's even more reckless to admire me. [A breath close to wry and bent to be near laughter.] I have a habit of disappointing.

[An admission she makes in her own continued recklessness, but with contradictory pride. It might be something to disappoint someone again, even for a moment; to have an opinion left to fall it. Admiration is only ever the decline to contempt, but once-

Once people looked at he does now. As someone to reckon with, not cosset or condemn or cast away.]

You have me twice. I wanted nothing more than to crack it beneath him...to tear the crown from his head and stomp it beneath my least favorite boots.

[The why - to pry the man out of the God, and set him free. But she won't give everything to Lazarus; it doesn't strike her as an interesting thing to do. Let him wonder at that.]

Sometimes one must be reckless for their prize...did you find winning this one satisfactory?

[She leaves her meaning deliberately ambiguous, of course.]

Do you think so? No... yes, I suppose you would.

[He seems to give it careful and intentional consideration as he looks at her with his deep-set, haunted eyes.]

I choose my allies, and I judge my allies. Every single one. I've decided that you are not a disappointment. Your lips could touch him while he knew who you were.

[He sounds so admiring, so reckless, and his young, thin face smiles.]

He knew who you were, and he let you close enough to tear the crown from his head and crack it beneath your worst boots. I'd give so much to crack it between my bare feet. I'd bleed for it, as you know, so... yes. It's more than satisfactory. I'd do it again, and again.

Edited 2022-10-24 02:20 (UTC)

[Mercymorn can't quite tell if this is a further attempt at seduction, and if it is, how much sincerity might be wound up in it. It's been an extraordinarily long time since anyone tried to woo her in any manner sincerely. The Cohort had the fear of her instilled in them long ago, and her brothers and sisters were too used to her as the unscalable mount. Even the fools of Blood of Eden never attempted to fling some sop in her path. Perhaps they'd had enough of that already with their beloved commander.

She has to admit it's flattering to be enticed into conspiracy, rather than having to serve as the goad. He says I choose my allies with such unfettered confidence for one so young and disadvantaged, like saying such a thing will make it so.

She's always had a weakness for fanaticism. She smiles back at him like she has a mouthful of bright feathers hidden behind her lips, eyes half-lidded in thought.]

The last person willing to look me in the eyes and say anything of the sort threatened to shoot me between the eyes for my trouble, which was exactly the sort of horrid thing she was always doing...but you.

[She reaches up and touches his jaw, very lightly, at the place it tips upwards on its way to hinge to the rest of the skull. She tilts her head, and makes a soft, humming noise towards the back of her throat, then drops her hand away.]

Let it never be said I am not reasonable. [Says the bloody woman with a mouth still full of teeth who cornered him here.] Let it not be said I am not amenable to cooperation.

Keep my name to yourself, and I will consider the rest fairly won.

[L's passion is a strange thing, pure however it presents. One could be forgiven for thinking it's an attempt at seduction; maybe it's similar, maybe it's close to those to impulses and desires all roped together like a wreath.

All he knows is that it's so rare for people to smile at him like they know what he's thinking. He's too cautious to return it, but his gaze lingers.]

I wouldn't threaten to kill you... you're not on that list.

[As though, of everyone in Trench, he could easily kill whoever he chooses. He stands and stares, as she touches the sharp line of his jaw and her hand slides away from the angle.]

Tell another reasonable and cooperative soul, why he would share the name "Mercymorn" with John Gaius. I've just met you, and I care more about keeping your business discreet, than his.

August + September Catchall

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cw: consent issues, toxic relationship dynamics

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