deercountry | who's seen jezebel?

Entry tags:

who's seen jezebel? | september catch-all

Who: Mercymorn the First, Paul Atreides, Ortus Nigenad, and you
What: September catch-all, open and closed prompts
When: Throughout September
Where: Trench and other Trench

Content Warnings: Cults, body horror, psychological horror, violence, death, marked by thread

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That new information slots into place with a nearly audible click, the cogs behind Mercy's flashing eyes whirring off into a swift sequence of realizations. The people who had been making an effort to seem casual in their distancing cease making an effort, except for a young man with a birthmark blotting half of his face who comes to still, curious attention.

"You," Woe says, in a near purr of contempt, "The clever one."

The hair on the back of Anna's neck lifts for seemingly no reason at all. The quality of the air does not change, no breeze stirs it, no barely-there static infiltrates the skin.

"Your other sister, unless you've misplaced that one as well," which is a very unfair thing for a kidnapper to say, "The superior article. 2B."

That is an unpleasant sensation. Anna assumes it's just because of the fear running through her, maybe exacerbated by the fact that the metaphorical atmosphere has been sucked dry. Her attention is entirely on Woe, though she can feel the presence of someone else behind her and would love if this didn't play out miserably. (Someone's in the background with Dinah.) Yes, this is probably going to be a bit of a spectacle, but she doesn't want anybody else to be hurt. And she has to hope that Woe doesn't want that, either.

"I'm your Venus," she says dryly, trying to put all of the fear behind her. It sure ain't working. Her weight shifts very slightly on her back leg; she's more interested in protecting Dinah than she is in starting a fight with Woe. "I didn't know you and Tubes had met. How'd you know she was my sister?" she asks with suspicion high in the back of her mind and the front of her voice. She doesn't want to address the whole superior article bit; Woe's right to call her that, of course, but that's a matter of self-esteem more than anything else.

"And here I thought you knew ever so much about me," she scoffs, setting one hand on her hip and flicking her fingers at the poised young man in some obscure signal that has him take a shallow breath as he refocuses on Anna.

"You're of the same type, are you not? From the neck down, at the very least, which is precisely the opposite order they should have done it - but that's beside the point. If you're thinking about doing anything dramatic, understand that I will drop you like a sack of root vegetables, you odious tuber." She sniffs in a way that is almost a snort, then addresses the follower who has taken one edging step closer. "And that goes for you double."

"She shouldn't speak to you like- " he starts, in a low, smooth, pleasant voice underpinned by agitation, and she cuts him short by pinching her fingers mid-air. It's not necromancy. It's just effective leadership.

"She shouldn't, but people insist on doing many things they shouldn't do," she explains, without patience, "Your - Tubes, really? - sister has been of great service to me, and to these people, which is why I am pointedly overlooking your appalling manners."

Anna thinks, holding her tongue, that this has been extremely polite by her standards, and that if there really is a certain way that she shouldn't be talking to Woe, she hasn't come close to it yet. But if Woe has all of this under control, including those followers of hers, then maybe it's worth re-examining this whole power dynamic at play here. Here she thought they were people she'd gathered up to hold captive until she suckered in others to bring them home.

"Well, good on her. I didn't know she fell through here, but I had a feeling she'd be into the whole helping people things. Runs in the family," she says, her voice dry, "Even if she's a far fuckin' cry nicer than me about it." Anna doesn't ask whether 2B is safe; she shouldn't trust Woe, but she does in this case only because she's sure 2B would have contacted her if she were in trouble, one way or another.

"I'm not looking to do anything dramatic. We can figure out any personal bullshit once we both get back topside, Woe," Anna says, like a promise. "Right now I'm making my priority saving as many people as possible. Then we'll meet up and we'll have the world's shittiest tea party and figure out everything else." She rolls her shoulder like it's going to help her get into gear for whatever ritual's ahead of her. "Let's go, Dinah."

The standards of Anna, a person from an ostensibly democratic nation with alleged division of church and state, are a far cry from the standards of Woe, who helped construct the very bones of an imperial cult. What Woe counts as proper manners involves a great deal more immediate submission - but even where she comes from, she is an extremist on that particular point.

“She is, indeed, much nicer than you,” and because Woe is nothing if not an intolerable piece of work herself, “And prettier.”

“As for a tea party - I am afraid I shall have to miss that undoubtably unforgettable occasion, as I have absolutely no intention of returning ‘top side’, so consider the offer declined.” Woe flicks her hood back up over her hair and does go so far as to snort this time, in a refined, polished sort of way. “Contain your heartbreak, if you can.”

Dinah is already by the door, as if by magic, or the power of conflict avoidance. Woe gestures to the unnamed young man who falls into step behind her obediently, and outward they will go. Usually, Woe might offer some refreshment or rest before this departure, but ‘Venus’ should have no need of it - and the sooner they’re quit of each other, the less volatile the sitation will be.

Anna scowls, and channels the energy of her girlfriend whom she loves very, very much. "My tits are fat and my dick's fatter," she says, flipping Woe off as she walks past her. It would be a much more dramatic way to end a conversation if they weren't going to the same place, so as it stands, it carries the energy of saying goodbye to someone on the street then walking in the same direction.

"I didn't think you could choose to stay down here," she barrels through, trying to ignore the awkwardness and let it be merely a passing comment. She knows she will not be successful. "What's the matter, you that sick of John?" She keeps going, both through the door and deeper into conversation topics she shouldn't be pushing. Either way, she's definitely burned through any hospitality by now, so it's probably for the best that there's no libations being offered here.

"'Cause I gotta say, I'd pick the blood-starved beasts too."

Anna may one day find it funny, the things that set these immortals off. Her crude words and vulgar gesture earn her only a pointed, prim scoff as the troupe of four return to the outdoors empty of other life.

What makes the quietest set of footsteps cease (followed swiftly by the other two) is the question. Anna makes it a full step and sentence further before the curious lift of her hair comes once again, and without warning, or even pain, she topples like a dead thing.

Dinah makes a stifled, half-gasped sound; the young man makes none. There is a rustle of motion behind Anna, who may only look unblinking ahead, and the quiet instruction of: "Spit."

Two pairs of feet pass her by. Anna may find some consolation in the hesitation of the pair that belong to the girl she is doing a favor, even if they do not stop. They go on for a while, all the way to the end of the street (passing through the ward with a snapping hum distinct from Woe's, a minute detail that may well be lost on Anna, under these circumstances), and both cloaked and hooded figures turn right, leaving only Anna and Woe.

"I told you it was vulgar to attempt to provoke me," Woe says, contemplatively, behind and above her. There is a whisper of cloth and the muffled contact of knees to cobblestones almost touching Anna's immobilized skull. Deft fingers tuck her hair behind her ear. The delicate edge of a small, fine nail dipped in viscous liquid touches just at her revealed hairline at her temple and begins to draw in light, unbroken, barely catching lines.

"Do you know what the trigeminal nerve is?" Woe asks, with dreadful quietness. "Try to move anything, if you don't."

Anna has fallen before she even knows what's going on. She wants to speak, but for the shock of it—mental, this time, though she's certain the physical will come shortly, as her body becomes aware that it was maybe an inch or two from cracking its own skull on the stone. Slumped over as she is, her legs and feet a jumble beneath her, her arms nowhere close to catching the fall, her head landing first on top of her metal arm and then sliding to the cold, damp ground from there, bound by gravity, she feels utterly powerless.

She isn't present as Dinah and the other person leave her behind with Woe; she can't even will her tongue or jaw to form the word "help", or maybe even "please". She isn't aware of anything but the dull chorus in her head, the one she thought she'd left behind two months ago. But choruses always repeat, don't they. It's basic songwriting.

It's happening again. It's happening again.

She wants to shut her eyes and pretend that she's anywhere else, but even if they could listen, she would only be able to remember salt and blood and lightning. The splinter of wood, the slow descent of a body into the water. The uncaring shoulder, the boy who would be king, the gunpowder, the screaming and blood and feathers and bile and the crackling of lungs and the defeat and the loss.

Her body is screaming and it's the only part of her that can. She is on the beach. She is in the black forest. She is in the water, she is in the lab. Anywhere but here, anyone but her.

"And here I thought myself in the presence of one who knows everything." The sketching of symbols in an unbroken line of cool saliva goes on, working down Anna's cheekbone with the unwavering hand of a calligrapher, artist and technician all in one.

"As the name suggests, the trigeminal nerve separates from its roots into three distinct branches, and before today, I doubt you would have ever had cause to be grateful for them...so allow me to introduce you."

"The ophthalmic." Her other hand is unoccupied. She taps the side of Anna's head, and the young woman's eyes shut with a bizarre buzzing sensation flaring across her forehead and scalp. She moves her fingertip a very slight distance, and taps again. "The maxillary." A humming throb shoots through the soft tissue of her upper palate and into her sinuses, the brisk clearing out of sharp ginger. "The mandibular." Her tongue spasms as her jaw clenches, relaxing in a passing instant. There is no pain, not even true discomfort. Not of the physical kind.

"Position. Movement. Sensation." Woe rests the pad of her index finger on the branching point of the nerve, obedient as the girl is not. "All of it through such delicate, complex apparatuses."

Then she is silent, except for the nearly imperceptible whisper of nail gliding over skin, for the four minutes required to complete the binding curse. It's a devilishly tricky application. She leaves Anna's eyes closed. Perhaps she forgets to open them until she sits back on her heels and flicks the last of Dinah's spit from her hand into shattered dust, firing the impulse that flicks Anna's eyelids upright again like thrown shutters.

"I haven't the faintest idea of what grudges you bear, or what intimacies you imagine you have indulged in - you appalling poppet - you grotesque parasite - that you believe grant you any right at all to speak to me as if I am one of your little playmates." Her fingers are hard and sharp on Anna's chin as she turns her face upward, Woe leaning over her in a fall of rough-cropped hair, her eyes smouldering pits of chemical overrun, a boiling and unclean colour. "But I would have tolerated it...I would have overlooked..."

Silence, again. Her own jaw works mechanically, a rasping grit of teeth, before she brings herself to continue.

"When you reach the other side of the portal, you may imagine that you will vent whatever spleen you have on that girl. If you do, you and your trigeminal nerve will live to regret it." She releases Anna's jaw abruptly, pressing up to her feet in a swift, unfolding flick, like a switchblade. She looks down at the fallen girl, and in a final, contemptuous indignity, nudges her with the toe of one boot.

"Get up. I want rid of you."

The words that Woe uses are ones that Anna might have heard, once or twice, in the odd medical drama. She has absolutely no practical knowledge of what Woe is telling her. If this were an actual lesson, she might be listening. But Anna is caught deep within her own head, and maybe it's the walk into a new layer of reality, maybe it's being slammed so directly with her biggest trauma point for the second time, maybe it's so many other things, but she barely feels present this whole time. She doesn't know how to feel other than numb.

It's what she had wanted the least and something she had spent her life running from. That someone would be able to come along and just... control her. Like she was programmed. Like someone said or did something, and she had no choice but to follow. It's happening again. She remembers a binding curse on her legs, sending her to the ground, forcing her to crawl into the house that had torn her heart from her body because it was the safer option.

(She thinks of home.)

Her eye is glassy when it's open, and the darkness when it's forced shut is no comfort. She sees a creature of meat and eyeballs, she smells formaldehyde and leaking halogen, she hears a whine forged by years of standing too close to speakers and the click-click-click of a reel in a projector. It's happening again. She remembers the worlds swirling around her, vying to champion her body. Every piece of it, all at once, the thousand lives that make her up crashing into her, spears to her joints, knives to the fragile strings holding her together.

(She begs for help.)

Someone's eye opens, not by choice, and their brow furrows like all of this chafes. They narrow their eye as soon as they have the chance, their gaze fixing on this woman in a strange way—depth and height are both wrong. They reach to their hip for a blade that isn't there, not realizing that it's on their back instead, and they brush hair from their face so they can deliver a proper miserable, murderous scowl.

The voice they use is level, but firm. A road frozen with black ice. Utterly vacant of the casual irreverence the other girl's voice used. "If you don't want me to vent your spleen, you'll think twice about trying that again."

Edited 2022-10-05 21:26 (UTC)

The anchoring of the soul had once concerned the Saint of Woe greatly, in the days before she became any kind of Saint at all, and it has never ceased to be one of her preoccupations long after the necessity of its understanding had passed. When the one soul sinks and the other surfaces, she watches with flat, glittering avidity, her hands half-flexed at her side like talons.

Then the newly emerged addition speaks, and Woe crumples like crushed sheet metal into an extremity of frustration, pinching the bridge of her own nose tremendously hard as she ducks her head and billows with a long, long suffering sigh.

"I should like to see you try," she says, with the fervency of someone who really would, "You would be shocked how little of you I need to effect the transfer - but we haven't the time." She lets her head fall back, carelessly, and drops her hand to curl briefly on her own chest. "Let's get on with it."

With that, she sidesteps Anna, or Venus, or whoever this might be, and proceeds onwards with a chopped, impatient stride. She plainly expects to be followed, with her back bared and her allies absent.

The untempered, volatile mixture of souls - the persistent instinct to violence - the utter inability to comprehend, to learn - Woe can begin to imagine why this cybernetic revenant chafes against God. It is an understanding she would prefer not to have come to.

A2 reaches behind her back as soon as she has a clear shot on this other person. The sound of steel leaving a makeshift sheath is easily heard over the relative silence, but the android doesn't care. It isn't something that should be happening, whatever's happening now. It hasn't happened before and it may never happen again. But A2 is being afforded an opportunity.

She brandishes the blade at her side as they walk, and with no regard for her own health or, seemingly, for recent history, she raises it to swing. But her arms stop as something blares silently within her chest, her core. In someone else's ears. WARNING, it says in code that should be crude and indecipherable yet still reverberates through her like a tolling bell. YORHA UNIT TYPE-A NO.2 MAY NOT ATTACK HUMANS, it tells her, and she scowls.

"Fine," she mutters, keeping the sword at her side instead. It can be an accent piece, something to remind others that she isn't someone who should be fucked with lightly. She can tell that she won't be keeping her blade out for much longer anyway. There's only so long they can delay whatever ritual that these humans have figured out.

"I should've known better than to think humans would be nicer," she adds, walking in lockstep behind Woe. "I guess there was a reason you all died, after all."

Despite Woe's apparent unconcern, there is a minute shift in her shoulders when the android proves as incapable as her sister of raising a weapon against a human. It's less the unstitching of mortal terror and more the reprieve of being exempted from an errand, but it's more of an impact that Woe would be happy to know could be perceived. Perhaps that will count for something. It's more likely that it won't.

"Humans are a generally disappointing prospect," Woe says, frostily, "It is only by grace that we are saved, and through grace that we endure...among our many other foibles."

Dinah and the young man accompanying her wait for them under a cracked, dead streetlight. The young man is alertly impassive, taking everything in and projecting nothing out; Dinah is his inverse, fidgeting from one foot to another in distraction until she sees them turn the turn, her relief at seeing the face of Anna honest and clear.

"She didn't do a thing to you," Woe adds, frost plunged to degrees measured only in Kelvins, "Keep that in mind, whatever you call yourself."

A2 doesn't say much, which may be a reprieve. She doesn't know anything of grace, of saving people. She can't understand humanity even after years riding alongside one of them. All she knows is her programming, and the truth behind that programming, and she wishes that she could even work up the energy to fume about it. But it's been years and years of the same lie, debunked and recycled within other models, and it's been years of dealing with the loss of the last person in A2's life to believe that lie. And the stupid, stupid things someone will do when they believe a lie enough.

In an uncharacteristic move, A2 is not paying an enormous amount of attention as the little adventuring party reconvenes. She looks down at the girl who's trying to find the face of someone who is no longer present, and all she can do is reflect back as unmoving, as inhuman as polished stone. "I know who did what to me," she says simply, once the four of them are together again. At least Woe's iciness is a comfortable temperature—and at least it doesn't extend beyond iciness. There's no threat in the way that A2 looks at Dinah or the other person. Stern and flat and serious, but not out for blood. "Let's finish this. We've dragged it out long enough."

“The first sensible thing you’ve said.”

With that tart retort, Woe has little else to say to the android for the duration of their trip, cutting off Dinah’s faltering questions with an upraised hand. They travel in silence away from the camp, proceeding to the ruined wasteland where a cairn sits, and the young man watches over them as Woe proceeds with distinct professionalism through the ghoulishly intimate ritual. She is not unkind with her hand dripping in mingled blood and filth on Anna’s chest, Dinah huddled at the android’s side looking between them both with hope that slices through any and all trepidation.

The portal comes, a blazing sigil in the air that Woe all but shoves the pair of them through as she remains anchored on her own side (with lashings of tendon and bone hooks at her feet, in case Anna feels clever), and all at once, Anna and Dinah are safely on the other side. The girl detaches from her shyly at first, and then, at the first deep breath of clean, sweet air, she trembles, clasping her hands over her mouth at she beholds the world renewed.

“I’m home,” she says, in great, shaken wonder, and then she whirls back on her feet to toss herself on Anna in a fervent hug, burying her teary face in her shoulder, “Thank you, thank you, thank you -“

It will be a touch of work to pry her off, but the ward on Anna’s face won’t so much as twitch at her doing so. Dinah will eventually make her fumbled goodbyes and dart off in search of her loved ones, hair fanning out like wings behind her as she goes.

The ritual is far grosser than A2 expected. She doesn't flinch at the idea of being smeared in blood; she's had worse. Applying it so meticulously is almost cute. The buzz of magic hums along her insides and she's not afraid, exactly, but on her guard the entire time. The hair on the back of her neck stands on end one final time, but this time A2 can understand where it's coming from. And then the ritual is complete, and the world is back to the one that A2 remembers. (Remembers from behind one eye. Remembers as a passenger. Feeling this all on her face, even if she's borrowing it from somebody else, is brand new. It's astounding. Salt fills what she's come to call her lungs as she breathes in deep.)

And she's taken out of her reverie by the press of a human body against her shoulder. Anna would know how to handle that sort of reaction from Dinah. A2 stands there stock still for a moment, then hesitantly presses her hand against the little human girl's back. Is this the kind of person that the one who shares this body has made of it? It must be, from the reaction of this person she saved. Anna must be, A2 thinks, very good at being a human. Complicated and angry and full of love at the same time as being afraid and cowering and begging for someone else to show her how love can be a shield all its own.

A2 doesn't know what any of that means. All A2 knows is that she's going to receive a good grade in protecting this human, something her programming assures her is both normal to want and possible to achieve. She watches Dinah go, then, off to whatever place she's going to go. And A2 steps away, into a town that she's lived in for a year and has never truly, actually known. The other humans here recognize her, but they don't seem too put off by any show of stoicism, which is for the best. Her footsteps take her along a path she shouldn't recognize, to a home with a fresh garden in front of it and a lock on the door that the key in her pocket knows.

She walks into a house that is only halfway hers, into a room with an unmade bed surrounded by the life of someone who only looks like her. And she finds the omni in her pocket, and she leaves Anna a message. A2 stretches out on a bed that doesn't belong to her and closes her eyes (no), and when she wakes up again, she doubts she'll still be in control. But she doesn't want control anyway, does she. Not right now.

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who's seen jezebel? | september catch-all

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cw: saliva, violation of bodily autonomy, body horror, psychological horror

cw: ptsd, dissociative anxiety, also all the above

cw: violation of bodily autonomy, body horror, psychological horror

cw: trauma, dissociation, etc

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