Mercymorn the First (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
acidjail) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2022-09-08 11:17 am
acidjail) wrote in deercountry2022-09-08 11:17 am
acidjail) wrote in deercountry2022-09-08 11:17 am
cw: unethical experimentation, death, attempted suicide, attempted murder
Mercymorn reads of two young boys and a woman with kind eyes and a sad smile who took care of them. She reads of how the woman was alone on the ship, keeping watch over the thousands of humans in cryo-sleep, until she found those two as infants and took them in, watching them grow and grow over a year.
She reads of the boys wondering if the humans will be friends with them, when they awaken. Of the first time they met one, after Rem. The hope it brings.
"We can work through a few little differences," Knives says. "If we just talk to each other...we can come to understand one another."
She follows the boys as they sneak in where they're not allowed, and find something they never should've seen.
They don't take it well. One collapses from the shock; the other lingers in consciousness but is absent in spirit, refusing to eat, needing to be physically dragged from the chamber which holds the remnants of Tesla's corpse. The first he speaks is to accuse her of deceit, of raising them only to continue the experiments. She swears up and down that she'd never be involved such a thing again, that she desperately regrets not putting a stop to it the first time.
Kill me, he demands. Just...kill me! This place...there's nothing but humans here!
His face grows gaunt from starvation; he does not speak further until she brings an apple and a knife to cut it with, one day. He saves up his strength for the moment it's left unattended, and steel live in his fingers and aimed at his throat, but she catches the blade midway, staining it crimson with her fingers.
"Is that your answer? You're going to throw everything away so easily?"
She doesn't know what she's talking about, and for a moment everything feels clear and finished when the blade finds its mark in her again; he thinks he may be free of the specter of Tesla's pain until the moment where she collapses by his feet and he suddenly can't stop screaming, tears ripping out of him in wild sobs.
In the story, Mercymorn the First hears one she learned before, from the being who is neither man nor necromancy. The story about the blank ticket which could take you anywhere, if only you lived to fill it in. The woman called Rem implores Vash to live, and he does.
The three of them do, in fact, as Knives awakens. As Rem confesses a second time, and he appears to forgive. They're happy, one might think. It could've stayed this way until it was time to return to cold sleep -- and yet of course, it couldn't at all. The ship malfunctions, and Rem can either save them and herself, or them and the still-sleeping crew.
She doesn't choose herself. It is the last time Vash will ever see her alive.
cw: unethical experimentation, death, attempted suicide, attempted murder, panic attacks
The files on their fellow creature give her pause, lingering on them from where she adheres to the ceiling on sticky strands of tendon. Do they understand, these cuckoo children, the whole of what they read? The base horror of it, prosaic as it is, of course - but the rendering of a body to an object before it dies is something she has found children only grasp at the outside edges.
That is still enough to crush the ebullient young thing to a bruised, curled up husk of himself, his easy, idiot smiles fled. He wastes away. He turns from life, then lashes out to cut at it, and she watches, and she does nothing, because there is nothing to be done.
(He told her that he understood the risks he undertook, the things he might be subject to. Here is his understanding, a blade in his hand, inward and outward.)
The ticket. The woman who wants him to live more than she wants herself to; the woman who wants them all to live, so terribly, so devotedly, that it sets her alight, a candle flame through a door that closes forever over it.
They break away.
Mercy's breath is very hot in her mouth. Her body quakes and tightens around her as she encloses herself in her arms, suspended away from the boys who wail and wilt, and she is locked in herself with the thing that never runs away from her, that lives where she lives, and as safety claims them, and the memory ends, she finds herself on the floor without knowing how she came to be there, hunched over the slim volume with wetness on her face.
There is no one to needle her from it, to strike her hard across the face or to clasp her hard inside their arms, or to laugh too loud and bright with fingers carded into her hair, tugging at their roots, brittle nails in her scalp until it bled, and Mercy shoves herself blindly at her own knees like a huddled, sick animal, trembling in silence.
no subject
It's following one such errand that Vash comes in the room to find Woe on the floor, huddled around herself, shaking and distraught.
He's never liked that name; it has always seemed unkind to associate a person with misery in such an intrinsic way. Even "Vash the Stampede" only carries the implication of destruction and suffering. Instead of invoking that name, then, he does what he did the first time they met and sits down beside her -- only this time, rather than offer his sleeve, he sits so that his intact arm can wrap around her shoulder, and he doesn't speak at all.
Perhaps he can never truly escape the monstrosity of Vash the Stampede and the weight of all the harm he's capable of, but in this moment he wants to exist without those titles and the pain they carry. He just sits, and stares up at the ceiling, and perhaps it's fitting that his own thoughts drift toward Rem as he holds her there. She would know what to say, he thinks. She always did.
no subject
When her sometimes roommate arrives, she knows. She keeps track of his comings and goings not by choice, but because he is the only living thing that is anything like himself, and now she knows more precisely why.
The hunch of her back is like a withered corpse's, the absolute contracture of ligament and sinew by desiccation, and she doesn't move to rise. She doesn't shift in recognition of his arrival, or when he sits down beside her, or even when the heaviness of his arm falls over the sharp and desolate arch of her shoulders.
But the shaking stops like a switch has been flipped. So does the grinding of her teeth. Mercymorn is inert and silent as a tissue sample fixed in suspended animation.
no subject
He doesn't ask her what happened. He doesn't ask her if she's alright. He doesn't even utter an "I'm sorry" in blanket empathy as he had that first time they met. Instead, after some time sitting like this, he quietly starts to hum a tune. Mercy may find she recognizes it, after what she's just seen. It was her favorite song, after all.