13 . autumn catch-all

[necrolord]

Who: John Gaius and company.
What: After a rough summer, the King Undying lays low.
When: September - October
Where: Mostly Gaze.

Content Warnings: Tagged in headers as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

Comments

live bug reaction; cw: animals in distress

[unsheathedfromreality]

Illarion had left the party and left Iskierka behind. She hadn't minded--she has so little to mind with, and besides she had her own s'more to peck on where she'd settled down to keep a faceted eye on Petrie as he slept.

Then something very bad happens to her Sleeper.

She screams loud enough to wake the dead and tumbles off her perch in a spray of graham cracker crumbs and melted marshmallow. Petrie wakes with an answering shriek of alarm and only barely ducks a huge flailing feathery tail that sweeps everything around him to the floor.

In seconds and a drift of Omen-smoke it's over, and a new-old creature curls into herself on the floor, eleven feet of shivering misery.

human dad to the not-quite-rescue!

[butnotyet]

Augustine and Pyrrha were in the midst of the sort of tired, meaningless, often-enough-wordless conversation that anyone might have expected, between two old veterans of the same fights who'd known each other for centuries-or-more — teasing about whisky vintages, delicately dancing around the simple fact that if John goes off to be, ah, intimate, by himself or with the shrike or with anyone else, well, both of them will feel it —

And then, well, there's screaming. And some of it is Petrie's — his son, more or less, emotionally if not societally speaking, and the only one of any of his sons present in Trench (thank goodness) — and some of it is unfamiliar-but-not, and he vaults the couch more quickly than if someone had been shooting at him, in order to get back to Petrie's perch —

— or rather, what's left of it.

The pterodactyl is clinging to the curtains and wailing out his confusion and fear; easy enough to persuade him to latch, shuddering, to the front of Augustine's shirt, instead. The creature on the floor, however — that takes him a long, long moment, chirping wordless soothing sounds at Petrie while staring down at it, to realize that Iskierka had been watching Petrie, that Omens are unkillable, that no monstrous other dragon-or-dinosaur broke crashing through a window in order to eat the mothbird — that, in fact, the window is one of the only things in the immediate vicinity that isn't damaged — and he asks, in a very low voice, as one would with a panicking animal, "Iskierka? Is that... well, you, more or less, in there?"

«I think it is, anyway,» Alfred allows, peering at her dubiously. «Here, let me take him,» he adds, coiling up around Petrie and floating him away in the mind-twisting way that has nothing to do with a snake's preferred means of locomotion that he seems to have mastered, and only just in time, as Augustine freezes, between one step and the next toward the creature on the floor, as he's hit by pain and panic and sick dread and horror and a desperate need for it to stop —

"Fuck," he breathes, or whispers — breathing is a bit hard, at the moment — and forcibly walls away those emotions enough to move again: scooping up all eleven miserable feet of miserable dragon-omen, grateful that she weighs about as little as she possibly could at that size, and storms off toward John's room, cradling her as delicately as a newborn.