who's seen jezebel? | september catch-all

[acidjail]

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

Comments

cw: trauma, dissociation, etc

[hauntedsavior]

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."

[acidjail]

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.

[hauntedsavior]

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."

[acidjail]

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."

[hauntedsavior]

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."

[acidjail]

“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.

[hauntedsavior]

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.