wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

[acidjail]

Who: Mercymorn the First, Paul Atreides, and you
What: October catch-all, open and closed prompts
When: Throughout October
Where: Various locations in Trench

Content Warnings: Depression, suicidal ideation (passive), body horror, memory loss

Comments

Mercymorn the First

[acidjail]

open

[acidjail]

a butterfly beaten in a summer rainfall | open to gaze house residents

[acidjail]

The revenant emerges from the study in the absence of God, padding on unshod feet to the display of weapons in the room adjacent. She stands before them for a time marked by the ticking of a distant, mistimed clock, her unbound hair falling across her face, all that moves of her the tiny lift and plunge of her chest with unwelcome breath.

She does not touch the rapier, or the net that hangs above it. She leaves them to the snake and the butterfly, whose voices she does not hear, and she goes walking through the halls of the last house in the world she ever would have chosen to haunt.

(But of course, she has a choice. There is always a choice. That is the most terrible thing.)

When she comes across another unquiet body, she stands in a doorway, or at the threshold of a hall, or frames herself, somehow, at odds with the house around her, a pallid parasitic orchid intruder from some other place, and she will not be the first to speak as she observes them with bruised rose-petal eyes flecked through with clotted green.

just normal family interactions

[butnotyet]

Once upon a time, a ship of fools crossed the Second Saint to serve the King Undying, and the lesson they learned about this mistake was, well, nasty, brutish, and short, to borrow a phrase from whichever long-dead pre-Resurrection author that had been. The ship itself survived, as did the Saint; the fools were... repurposed, to a higher calling.

Then, as now, the First Saint observes her in turn, for long and silent seconds, before he acts.

(But of course, he has also been observing her since the snake reported her ungainly attentions to his brother, from the other side of the house; she may have left the rapier and net to the care and attention of the Omens catching up with each other, but that doesn't mean her departure left them behind; Alfred has been utterly delighted to develop his capacities for quietly spying on observing the entirety of the house's internal dimensions, and even fully aware of his general presence in the house, people still don't ever seem to remember how many places in a given room a thin and flexible dark shadow can use to disappear.)

This time, the comb that rests in Augustine's outstretched fingers did not come from a convenient shard of bone, peeled away from a sailboard's cross-brace; it came from the top of his dresser, part of a matched set, for all that he tends far more often to use the brush.

"Your hair still looks appalling," he remarks, in exactly the same offensively-lighthearted tone he has reserved for his most aggressively annoying comments for at least the last three thousand years. "Don't tell me you haven't been able to finish detangling it once, in all this time?"

closed

[acidjail]

narrative

[acidjail]

you came over me like some holy rite | cytherea the first

[acidjail]

Mercymorn hardly ever goes out.

There are no wards on the doors or the windows, no locks or bars. No terrible construct will uproot itself to chase her down if she steps across the threshold. God might even let her go, for a while, now that he's made his point, and it's the point that pins her still to the shoddy cardpaper illusion of this house.

So she curls up on it, numb, dumb thing that she is. She lines her nest with pilfered quilts atop a mattress she keeps hospital cornered by rote. She fusses, now and then, with the furniture she set aside when she claimed this dusty, secret place, all of it gone to ruin and wreck, now knit into an intricate geometric puzzle at one end of the attic. When base needs compel her, she descends the narrow dropping stairs and attends to them in the cloistered dark of the hours after midnight. She sleeps. She scratches paint from the blinded window and sets her eye at it, sometimes, when she cannot.

So when she find herself at the edge of the woods that creep up on the house like a sieging army, it is almost as strange as what drew her out to these trees, the pale and gleaming fey thing that had come to stand at the farthest lunar shadow of the house.

The fey thing wears a tattered sheet stained with the whole reeking rainbow of human biological function. She has fawn coloured curls sizzling close to her scalp, delicate cheekbones under skin so fine it might split open upon them, and blood all about her slack mouth. She has eyes so blue and luminous they hardly seem real, even clouded and sightless as they are, and from her sagging, nerveless fist she trails a rapier.

"Oh, my poor dead darling," Mercymorn says to Cytherea the First, traitor to God, killer of children, as she reaches forth to cradle her chill face in tender hands, "Look what they did to you."

It doesn't surprise her at all to find the sword in her belly. She would never have expected any less.

The fight is a quiet one. All their fights were always quiet ones. They could tear strips off each other in whispers, flense each other in near silence, all at their best, and Cytherea is far from her best. It could make Mercy weep, if she hadn't already wept more than enough over her dear little fool.

When they return to the house, Mercy's fingers tight laced to hers, Mercy is still knitting her fractured liver, and Cytherea wears a ghost ward of the most vicious rebuking kind on her wide, sensitive looking forehead. She wobbles and stumbles into Mercy more than once, her limbs all at odds, and they have to stop a while when she coughs. (She stabs Mercy again there, for her troubles. Mercy adds another ring to the ward.)

It's through the door and up the stairs, Cytherea wilted senselessly against her shoulder until Mercy may settle her on the edge of her mattress. She slips down to collect her supplies, hushed and quickened with purpose, and when she returns, setting her burden aside, she finds Cytherea has toppled over and back, breathing in a wet, agonal rasp.

Mercy hushes her solicitiously as she draws her back up, unwinding the ruin of her shroud to bare her wasted little frame. She dips a sponge into warm, soapy water and begins to clean her, with utmost meticulous care, this horror of a corpse she knows almost as well as her own.

"I never missed you when you were alive," she says, with a gentle ache, to the thing that is not her sister and her friend and her playmate, "However long we were apart, wherever you went...I never thought I'd miss you so horribly when you were dead."

Cytherea spits up a gobbet of mutant lung tissue. It's almost like being home.

Paul Atreides

[terriblepurpose]

open

[terriblepurpose]

come down where the tempests led | open

[terriblepurpose]

Along a distant stretch of the Farther Shores, near the sunken entrance of a cave no one goes to, there is a fire.

It burns inconstantly, a pale blue flame that gutters and flares by turns on the black sand, visible day and night no matter the weather. It casts a light that is not quite a light, one that obscures rather than illuminates, and so it takes getting close to perceive its source.

As one approaches, the marks of the flame's passing may be seen. Puddles of half-formed obsidian glass dot the black sands, and driftwood lies scorched and warped from the passage of terrible heat. The signs are not constant in their strength, but they continue unbroken until the one who left them behind may be seen.

Paul wears the rumpled blacks he did when he fled from his home, the sleeves of his shirt pitted with charred holes from wild sparks, and his hair is a wind-tangled dark fall across his eyes as he paces up and down the shore, or curls up at the lapping edges of the sea, or, when he cannot bear it any longer, he plunges into the waters and lets them boil around the corona of terrible blue radiance that clings to every part of him like a caul.

And the fire burns still, even in the saltwater. It blossoms around him like a malignant flower and lances at the sky as a tower. It orbits him in wild, whirling arcs. It licks along the curls of his hair and floods his eyes, corner to corner, with blue-on-blue luminous obliteration. Sometimes, when he walks, the sand itself drifts up into trailing rings around him, and the wind whispers like a voice whose words are just beyond reach.

When anyone comes close, no matter how careful or silent their approach, Paul whirls on his bare, blackened feet to hold his palms out to them in warding. The pale flames curl around his wrists like cuffs.

"Stay away from me." Paul says, in his own voice ringing out cold and forbidding as the abyssal depths.

[strikefirster]

Common sense was something that Johnny lacked for the most point. He trained fairly regularly at the beach so it wasn't exactly a stretch to find Paul there even if it was much further along than he'd normally go. He didn't really let the signs to the cave sway him either. He wasn't a pussy. He'd go where he wants to.

And what he really wanted to do at the moment was reach out to one of the most important people he knew here. Someone he had been more than a little neglectful to when his biological son and LaRusso showed up.

So despite all the fire and goth as attitude Johnny didn't stop in his approach. He did however hold up a six pack of beer.

"Yeah. Not happening, kid." His voice was a little blunt and nonchalant. He'd take his chances with whatever Paul might do here. Worst comes to worse he was down for a week. He had done that before.

"Why don't you come here and tell me what's going on? Or we can kick the shit out of each other until you get this shit out of your system."

[the_obedient_servant]

[They step inside, the glow revealing them and their carefully neutral expression in the light of the lightless flame. Their arms are folded, behind their back. They won't approach. Not yet.

What a dire change this is. But not too unexpected. Paul always was... kindred, to them. Even now. The only ones who have wielded fire in such a way, to stop them, to test them, to encourage them - it's their family. It's the hallway where Toriel stood in their way, pleading with Frisk to let her make them Chara's replacement. It's the bridge where Asgore killed them on that first loop, after they'd stopped running and started crying. It's the end of the world - with Asriel before them. It's the throne room, where their sacrifice awaits - or the king's end.]

I thought I'd find you here.

[grice]

[ falco wasn’t exactly quiet. his clothes made too much noise, no matter how fit for summer he was, with his shorts and nipped sleeves beneath his favorite bird skull pin cloak. when the fabric around him would weigh down with the slime he was exuding, what comes in his steps are an uncomfortable squishing noise, and yes, it was as uncomfortable as it sounded. when warned, falco stays in his place obediently, but he does nothing to indicate that he would turn heel.

he waits for further instruction, and from the light’s showing embers was falco, shining with aberrant wetness that no towel would fix for him at this point. he wears gloves in an attempt to keep the book wrapped in cloth and held in his arms clean. he looks on the verge of tears even from the distance— ]

I’d never do that.

[ his stand is worn, genuine, but not actually gentle. it rings true, but it is painful— irony and coincidence, that whenever their souls corrupted, it was with all of them. the web of the family they’ve made echoes and calls back to each other. they all respond in kind: dolor. ]

post duel

[wannasmash]

In July, Midoriya passed over this cave like many others when he saw no signs of Falco (boy or bird). It's unobtrusive and a good hiding spot, just as expected of the meticulous, careful Paul--who is now wreathed in uncontrollable, crematory flame. The body of a young man lives in its center like an afterthought.

("A dance with your son, here in hell!!")

His red sneakers crunch on too-familiar black glass. He'd have thought Dabi got into a scrap if he didn't already know what Paul was doing here. It's been only weeks since Dabi killed Bakugou and forced Midoriya to envision the loss of a childhood friend and rival he's always had in his life, save for a few months in Trench. Midoriya's Corruption was alleviated by the time of Gideon's awakening due in part to Bakugou's quick return from the sea.

The sight of blue flame stirs apprehension like a needle close to his skin, but Danger Sense does not prick. It can only make sure Paul is not someone hostile. If Paul burns him accidentally, there will be no warning. Midoriya approaches baldly, lugging a few fire extinguishers from his warehouse hideout with his super strength.

By now, as a matter of safety, Midoriya has demanded what explanation Paul could give for allowing this latent fire to spread in him unchecked, and has kept in regular contact with him remotely. Finally Kaworu is safe and Midoriya has a chance to visit the beach.

"Paul-kun, it's me." Unnecessary words that are necessary because they're filled with I love you and I want to hold you and You're stupid. He unslings his burden onto the cave floor with a metallic clunk, and his backpack follows.

You pick the timeframe

[justoscar]

[Even if he were struck blind, he would recognize those flames.

Oscar circled the beaches, having a general idea of where Paul would go from past pattern and his awareness on alert for a semblance of disaster. Their linked troubles in July had taught them both a great deal about each other-- their skills, their struggles, and their fears. While it was his Paleblood empathy that taught him what emotions felt like from other people, it was his unconscious memories of other lifetimes that cued him on what to look for, and his own instincts that guided his actions.

He would recognize that fire anywhere because he knew what the unnatural flames looked like, and after the terse message on the group chat he realized that Paul had not done the one thing he had directly asked:

Burn the book.

Oscar dropped down in the sand with the ease he had seen in Qrow many times before; the practiced ease of his movements was the result of months of practice, but it was the ice-like blaze of fear in the pit of his chest that kept him still enough to listen to the crackling flames that sparked against his nerves beg him not to send them dropping from the sky again.

He hadn't planned on speaking up. Not yet, but the obsidian scarring in the sand cracked like a million shards of glass under his feet when he shifted his weight. There was no hiding in the open canvas of the shore, but he had hoped for a little discretion from the powers-that-be.

Oscar heaved a sigh and searched for the steel cord of calm, forged over millennia, that had guided him through everything since arriving in Atlas. Softly, he spoke up.]

I'm sorry, Paul. I made a promise, and I plan to keep it.

[creidim]

There is much she can see from up here. The city sprawls out beneath her, stretches from the deep woods to dark-sanded coast. She could go further, she thinks. See what lies beyond the city and those woods, to what else may exist in the Waking World. But she doesn't; for as much as she might be able to, Luna remains within the city — a silent invisible presence, with occasional bouts of rain over a street or two when her mood takes a turn for the worst.

The blue flames draw her attention. Familiar, in a way. There are spells that can create flames like this. But this is not home, and there has not been another witch or wizard from her world here in some time. Still, she draws close to the sunken cave hidden along the Farther Shores — surprised by what she finds.

For a long time, she is silent. Simply watches him from above as he paces the sands. For all the complicated mess that lies between them, there is... concern. To burn like this, what magic is this? Bluebell flames may singe but they don't cause this amount of damage.

(In truth, Paul's current problem is familiar — he's not the only one who's had bother with troublesome books.)

"Paul." the voice is soft, from above. But there's no real pinpoint of where it comes from. "Why are you burning?"

cw: underage recreational drug deliveries

[possessum]

It hasn't become consistent enough a thing that it could count as a side hustle just yet, but Peter makes sure to have extra set aside in case someone needs it — and every once in awhile, someone does.

Maybe it seems like dumb fun, like attempts to hang onto some irresponsible teenage high school normalcy. Except Peter knows it's not really either of those things. Not in this place, and not before here, either. Not for him. There are times where, if he doesn't numb down his mind with a padding of hazy lull, he won't be able to function at all. Times the static buzz, the frantic bee drone of anxiety, would eat him alive. Times a beautiful, horrible, nerve-searing light shines too brightly inside, and he needs to gloss his eyes, heavy-lidded. There are some weeks he's more high than he isn't.

It helps with a variety-pack, in this place. Apart from one's internal demons (whether literal or figurative), there's Corruption and the blood effects and so many ways this world becomes too weighted and poisonous. When the request comes, Peter doesn't ask questions. Not even for how strange it feels, that request from that particular person.

He hasn't seen or spoken to Paul in— months. And while Peter has to coax himself like a child through gathering up a handful of pre-rolled joints to scoop into a little tin, chest feeling tight, remembering nightmares of waking up unable to move while a young man stood before him with colder eyes than Peter remembers him having before......

....he's still shrugging into his jacket and heading off in the direction that the other teen relayed to him via text. Because he may not understand exactly what caused Paul to reach out to him (Peter taught him how to smoke it once, at his party, and it was dumb and fun and nice), but one word whispers familiar within him. Desperate. There's a reason, there always is in this place. And it's always a plea, no matter how quiet.

It takes awhile to find the cave. The instructions were a drop-off, quick in and out, and Peter means to obey that, crouching down behind the designated jagged rock to set the tin against it, but.... something within him catches, freezes. A feeling, or maybe a smell — which sense is capable of detecting it? Peter isn't even sure, only knows that at his very core, he feels a prickling sense of dread so intense and so sudden that ever fibre of his being wants to run away.

He doesn't. Instead, he sits very still on his heels for a moment, crouched down with his fingers against the tin, and then he returns it to his pocket. He slowly stands, and he moves closer to the mouth of the cave. There's a light there, a little strange, dreamlike. And he realises what the smell was. The remnants of something burned nearby — scorched wood. It's not the same way flesh smells when it burns, but it triggers something all the same. He almost gags.

"Paul?"

The boy's there, and the light's there, and Peter realises weirdly belatedly that they're one and the same. He flinches back from those pale blue hands that so quickly turn to face him with that impossible perpetual burn. The older's eyes are wide and confused and frightened. But somehow, still, he doesn't run. Something's wrong, and Peter can't leave him, even if he also doesn't get any closer. Still, what he immediately thinks to say is—

"I won't hurt you."

[azurestar]

Lance spends a lot of time at the beach, and even so he has not explored every nook and cranny. The cave is unfamiliar, or perhaps he just doesn't remember it since he's not always mentally at his best when he's here. But it would be hard to miss Paul's light show regardless. He can see it for what it is, heat, energy, fire. A very familiar thing to him.

With a concerned frown, he comes over to where Paul is. It's been a good while since he saw him. At least to Lance's memory, which has been made spotty after spending too long in his deer form. When Paul spins to tell him to stay away, he obediently halts but doesn't seem concerned about himself. He raises his hands in a placating surrender, then slowly lights them with his own blue-gold fiery star energy.

"You won't hurt me." Having been where Paul is, he is rather certain that is at least part of why he's insisting on distance. So might as well ease that concern right out the gate.

[peripheries]

There's still dried salt in his hair as he makes his way over to the beach. He should have gone days ago. He wanted to. It's been like a siren song that he's done his best to ignore. The duel at the salt lake took all of his strength. Plans for a party that will never be broke his resolve. He allows himself to succumb and falls under its spell.

He walks on the rocky shores in bare feet and a robe left open but long enough to whip around his pale form like smokey tendrils. He looks beautiful and deeply inhuman. Like a messenger from another world.

Kaworu finds what he's been looking for in a cave.

"Paul."

you play the part of savior, i watch you come undone | open to gaze house residents

[terriblepurpose]

A boy kneels by the ocean in the cool air of an autumn dawn. On the sand beside him, his Omen lies curled up on herself, a black, formless quiver. He looks out at the golden pinks and pinked oranges of the sunrise, at the sun herself, a bright coin burning on the horizon.

He takes a short, sharp breath, and then another. He wipes his fingers under his dry eyes and nods, shakily, before he pushes up to his feet. He draws his shoulders back into socket and finds the centre line of himself, the immaculate column of his spine.

His Omen uncoils herself, and he turns to lay his burning hand on her newfound armour as she rises to meet him. She is the fire with him. Nothing that touches him does not also touch her, so he may lean to rest his forehead against the segmented coil of her side, by the lip of her yawning, many-toothed mouth. They stay like that a while, the boy and his soul, until at last, he scales her like he's done it a thousand times before. He has no hooks to sink under her plates, but his hands will be enough with her. Astride the great maker, he turns away from the sea, and they go.

The journey is not so long, for nothing will trouble them in their passing. The sun still hangs low when they arrive, and the boy slips from her back to stand by a deep gouge in the earth at the borderline of the great, dark house. His unshod feet burn wherever they touch, and around him is the aegis of the flame, the unkindled blaze of the devouring fire. He looks like a thing half-burned himself, streaked with ash, a survivor of some apocalyptic dream of perfect, endless incineration. At his back, his Omen rises up, her mouth the empty, toothed eye of the universe itself, a titan fit to have carved the mark at their side.

Above his head, light rings in coronal arcs unbearable to the eye. He bleeds invisible, devastating obliteration; he bleeds grief; he stands very still, and he does not move.

He waits.

[unsheathedfromreality]

It is dawn, and from the forest that borders the great, dark house rises the sound of singing.

Even in blood-polluted Trench, the birds greet the sun with their chorus. Deep in the woods it's at its thickest, the high forlorn whistles of chickadees overlaid on the chattering of juncos and cardinal trills. Nearer the forest verge, nearest where the maker measures herself against the sky, there are but scattered peeps and chirps uttered in fearful respect of the great devourer.

In that tentative hush, a single song rises--too human to be a bird, too avian to come from anything but a syrinx, in a tenor rusty as a jay's and echoing as a hawk over rocky desert. It meanders along a harmony that's missing its melody, telling a half-wordless story of the hundred million dawns that broke over a world untouched by mortal hands. All these things are passed, are gone, it grieves, all our glories spent, and still the day breaks untroubled; and still we live to greet the dawn.

The singer steps out of the forest at the far end of the Reckoning's sword-strike. He turns his head down to regard a mirror-silver scale, large as a dinner plate, half-buried in the churned soil. A touch of his boot shivers it to shining dust, and he moves on, still singing, to the bright-burning beacon of the boy.

He has not been on these grounds since that scale was shed; it took something this spectacular to lure him back, moth to flame, and remind him his best use was not rebuilding shrines in the far-flung woods. He stops at the boy's right hand, outside the reach of the flames, in the place of an accomplice or fellow-accuser. The reaper-hawk that joins them stands at his right hand in turn, and looks over their shoulders to the sight he cannot see.

"I did not think to meet you again so," he says, at length. "What has happened?"

[lipochrome]

Kiriona Gaia, like Gideon Nav before her, is a creature of surprisingly strict routine.

At around seven in the morning, a light in one of the tower rooms switches on. At eleven, it switches off. Whoever lives there never opens the curtains, but occasionally, one can make out the shadow of a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a sloppy haircut. She sometimes lingers behind the curtain, as if thinking about opening it.

She never does.

Kiriona knows Paul is out there. He's stayed put, so far, but there's no guarantee that will continue. After a day or so of this, Kiriona stops leaving her room. She's got her sword and her magazines and a thoroughly comfortable bed. What more could she want? It's not like she needs to go eat. This way, she doesn't have to risk running into him downstairs.

Time passes. Kiriona grows bored, and restless, but not lonely. She was always lonely. That's nothing new.

A horse has appeared, emerged from the hole in her chest, and it paces around her room. There are flesh-colored scars running down its coat, as if Kiriona's fractured ribs have scraped it clean off, and the horse remains little more than insubstantial smoke, trying and failing to coalesce. Kiriona hates looking at it, so she sends it away. Outside, where it belongs.

The mare approaches the maker. She is tentative, frightened, flickering in and out of existence. She is a sentinel, a messenger, a --

"Come on. Give up already, and get the fuck outta here."

Kiriona steps out the front door. Here, by the light of the fire, she is terrible and handsome and perfectly, awfully dead. Her coat has been replaced by one that is equally fine. Atop her head sits a wreath made of ferns. She knows to stay away from the flames, this time.

closed

[terriblepurpose]

i'm a house on fire and everyone is leaving | kaworu nagisa

[terriblepurpose]

Paul makes the journey home from the dojo in a haze of grey, tracing his steps by memory alone through the streets.

At some point, his numb, bare fingers fumble a message into his Omni, reaching out to the people who need to know. When he pushes the door open on the new apartment he shares with Kaworu to find it empty, his fear flutters so high in his throat that he can't make the sound he wants to make. He barely stops to pull off his boots and shuck his jacket before he walks mechanically into the bathroom and lowers himself into the enormous tub that had been one of the things that convinced him this was the place for them.

With his clothes still on, the cuffs of his sleeves singed, Paul turns the coldwater tap to full blast and sinks back into the rising water to stare at the ceiling.

(In the kitchen window, a poppy droops in the golden light of autumn, the edges of its petals blackening.)

[peripheries]

Dragging himself up the stairs feels like an impossible task but he manages it. He manages it despite his body feeling so empty that might as well be weightless, unable to even raise his own foot to the next stair he's so lacking in substance.

On the landing, Kaworu sees Paul's coat and shoes and hears the water running. He needs to be with someone. He needs someone to bring him back, redraw all his lines, make him find his own form again so it can hold his heart that's in danger of being pulled into nothingness.

He slips his own shoes off like shedding skin and pads over to the bathroom. It's one of his favorite rooms. It gets warm with the water, and Paul and Izuku's voices echo around the room like a chorus. Paul puts bubbles on his head and hums softly. It's a nice place.

Without stopping, as though it's one continuous motion, he climbs into the tub across from Paul and curls up, burying his face in his arms. The water isn't warm. It's cold. Cold is numb. He doesn't mind.