acidjail: rights to use paid by me; do not take (03)
Mercymorn the First ([personal profile] acidjail) wrote in [community profile] deercountry2022-10-06 03:30 pm

wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

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

terriblepurpose: (030)

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

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-10-13 07:51 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2022-10-13 20:01 (UTC)
unsheathedfromreality: (that i have made)

[personal profile] unsheathedfromreality 2022-10-17 03:45 am (UTC)(link)
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?"
terriblepurpose: (117)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-10-17 06:01 am (UTC)(link)
Paul does not turn his head towards the singer, only tilts it, just so, to better follow the rise and fall of a familiar alien melody. He knew those songs in another life he never lived. He could not sing them now if he tried.

"You know what happened."

Every other time Paul has stood on his threshold, his voice has come apart, a dissonant choir of ghosts spilling over his lips. It does not now. It is still and cool as the fragments of obsidian he left behind on the beach.

The fire whispers with a thousand tongues around him, drawing wrong-angled shadows underneath his gleaming eyes as he stares at a particular dark window of the house.

"You won the duel," he says, mildly, "Was it all that you wanted?"

His Omen does not move from behind him, even to greet her fellow Omen, the one no longer Iskierka. She towers like a graven obelisk, her blind eye seeming to focus on the same point as her Sleeper.
unsheathedfromreality: (as the darkness closes in again)

[personal profile] unsheathedfromreality 2022-10-17 11:20 am (UTC)(link)
Illarion does know what has happened, and which window of the house has captured Paul's attention; even so, he lifts a hand as if to say, and the flames? It should not surprise him if the answer is simple--the outward world reflecting the inward fire the young man burns with, mediated through blood magic and corruption--yet it should not surprise him if it is not. The lingering eyes are proof enough that Paul's is a soul that can be tangled, swift and sure, into strange outside troubles.

Yet Illarion says none of this, only tips his chin up--his Omen's following--as if he could also watch Gideon's window.

"She will be back," he says, quiet and sure. "The first months are the bleakest. You mourn for who you had been."

He is jealous, he knows, in some part of himself; Kiriona is an abomination of want, a mistake made of grief and selfish loneliness. Her father's sword and child-as-possession she might be, yet she is so because it is the only pattern John seems to know--a defective, warped pattern of paternity that knew love must be there but mangles its proper expression. Turned from her friends she might be, she still has them; she has family who will walk into hell for her, and damn the differences between the living and the dead.

It is achingly familiar and infinitely far from the lot of a fungible Unearthed soldier, abandoned on the battlefield and long after. Yes--Illarion is jealous of Gideon Nav, but it is one thin current in a greater wash of relief and hope. What has happened to her is terrible, and irreversible; it has ruptured her family in Trench and caused them terrible pain.

But all of that is not without remedy. All of that is the first step on a path he's already stumbling down, with many of the same people to guide his way. She's got even better chances at it than he does.

Yet he says none of this either. These are not thoughts for the vigil and funeral; they are not meet until mourning's over and real dawn begins.

Instead: the question of the duel, that outward expression of his own unrealized spasm of grief. His expression darkens behind his veil and there's reality in that look of guilt and chagrin, not acted but truly felt. "No, and may no duel I ever fight be all I wanted. That would be a horror."

Judicial violence, the correction of talon and blade, wasn't something to take joy in. And he still had.

"But he's kept terms and admitted his fault. No one died in what came after. It is enough," and he says it like, it should be enough, but it is not.
Edited (minor text fixes for being 0.5 asleep at the time of writing) 2022-10-17 18:09 (UTC)
terriblepurpose: (117)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-10-18 01:36 am (UTC)(link)
"Enough," Paul echoes, wonderingly.

Gold, if it was ever truly there, gives way to unshielded blue. The boy takes a deep breath, as the living still need to, and rolls his shoulders back as he lifts his chin and considers the sky vaulting above them, hazed with heat.

"I saw what happened." There is an easiness to the remark that defies his age, an assumption of equality that forecloses the possibility of accusation from a disappointed child. "You opened up into ribbons. You disassembled yourself. It reached into the salt. No one died in what came after. As if that's the only thing that matters. But look at what it got you - nothing that you wanted."

He'd woken up screaming in a disc of broken, glowing glass, abyssal salt-sunken water and blood spilling from his mouth feet from the shore to explode against the heat in silver clouds. He does not know if he was dreaming. He does not know if he is dreaming now, or if any difference remains between dreams and waking.

And here is Merlinus, reality restored to his feelings that Paul can see even now, his soul reshaped by another's will, and he has gotten everything that he believed it was his duty to require, he has gotten this change he did not desire, and that is, evidently, enough.

"Do you think he'll keep to the terms as long as you require?" Songs or no songs, the cant to his head and the curl to his question are all a young, never-born Prince's, requesting a report on a difficult contract. It is a deliberate affect; he lets Merlinus know that it is, with the faint, wry arch of his eyebrows. "He admits his fault. Does he accept it?"
unsheathedfromreality: (spent among the slain)

[personal profile] unsheathedfromreality 2022-10-28 03:34 am (UTC)(link)
Prophecy, Paleblood or otherwise, is so often a private exercise in Trench. One hears the words of an Old One or sees a vision of a Pthumerian or dreams the shifting currents of the future all alone beneath the Tree, and one emerges with new truth on one's tongue. Cassandra's Disciples would then bicker over meanings or interpretations or even whether the prophet had heard clearly, but very rarely did they argue the prophet might not have heard at all. (Leave that posture of faithlessness to the Scholars and others who pride themselves on cool-headed skepticism.)

Prophecy, true prophecy, must be anything but private among shrikes; any force, any entity, that would speak to a shrike alone and bid her bind the whole group with her vision was beyond suspect, if it even existed outside her at all. To hear Paul speak of what he'd seen, alone and far from the fray, is a shuddersome thing; it rouses Illarion's feathers and his Omen's with unease. Even if it is accurate--even if it is borne out by material, unquestionable reality--it is mad, it is dangerous. Hearing it is like watching Paul thread a cliff crumbling into the sea; he moves--speaks--with such surety and yet the situation decays, moment to moment, toward catastrophe.

"I beg you, Pavlik, to not see me so clearly, nor look to." The discomfort of being known--being told he got nothing he wanted--pales before sheer worry; he must issue the warning even if it goes unheard. His particular corruption had spread once through this vein already. Yet insofar as he's made himself a mystery worth looking at, is he not part-culpable in that?

His nameless Omen turns her head from the house to look at him instead. The dizzying parallax of it presses a rueful laugh and an admission from him: "Though it did not get me what I wanted. That is a thing better delegated."

The dragon-Omen's eyes then turn to Paul, to absent never-was Atreus' look on that human face. Illarion's still Courtier enough that even seeing it secondhand provokes a swell of longing in him, and with it the desire to play along.

"He accepts it half-heartedly. He will backslide, I judge. Not in a grudging way; he has honor enough not to claim he was tricked--and how shameful a play that would be, when he threw the fight-- But his habits are deeply graven, and the response he received for his admission will only reinforce them."

His tone is thoughtful, not accusatory; John had burned enough bridges that opprobrium would be his lot, for now. It did present a pretty challenge for those trying to better him despite himself. "Did you find his response at all satisfactory?"

He had, after all, named Paul among all the plaintiffs in Gideon's case.
terriblepurpose: (126)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-11-02 07:22 pm (UTC)(link)
The Omen that was once a mouse dips her great maw to hover closer to her Sleeper, the bent pose of an attendant. She is a small example of her kind, a minor worm, but she could still engulf him three times over. Without eyes, it is impossible to say what she might be looking at, but the angle of her orientation is a ghastly, off-kilter halo above his head and shoulders.

"I don't choose what I see," Paul says, with regret strung through it like twisted, spiked wire, "You slit the future like a shark. All of you. The world ripples in your passing."

A contortion passes over his face: more regret, something harder, more closed off. There's nothing wry about the second doubling, the troubled cast of someone to whom power came too early and too much. The dirt twitches at his feet as he draws in heated air, fingers twitching through what might be a rhythm at his sides. His eyes fall to Merlinus, then back to the house, fleeting and unreadable.

"The first time he told me he wanted things to be different," Paul starts, and falls silent. His fingers continue to work at the air like there is something in it he might weave.

"No." He lets the word drop like lead. "I do not find it satisfactory."

A crown of pale fronds, and another challenge framed as laughing apology, and only half a heart.

"He's very good at showing you what he needs to show you to make you feel sorry for him," Paul says, quieter yet, "Do you think that I am unsympathetic, Merlinus? Do you think that I am unkind? Unfair? Do you think I lack a sufficient capacity for forgiveness?"
unsheathedfromreality: (though i feel)

[personal profile] unsheathedfromreality 2022-11-08 02:30 am (UTC)(link)
I don't choose what I see, Paul says, and Illarion turns his own head as if to look at the younger man; even if he cannot see, it's still an act of connection, of recognition. The strain of uninvited seership is another thread drawn between them; it is also a problem, or very like one, Illarion's worked on before.

It is something that will also require more and deeper thought. (It is something he should, to his too-palpable chagrin, confirmed before now. Before he'd taken himself out of the young duke's orbit for another problem like one he'd worked on before.) He sets a mental marker on it to revisit.

"I think none of these things, Pavlik. If you do not always show these virtues, it isn't because you lack them." The shrike turns his own face back to the house and by implication its most troublesome occupant.

"I think you are young, and yet already resigned to what a duke--or a Prince--must be. I think these two truths conflict in you, and it was natural for you to seek a kindly Teacher to help resolve them for you. You strive always for better, for yourself, and to protect your beloved Court.

"He failed them. In every way he could, he failed them, and made you also an accomplice in that failure. It is proper to hold such a man away from you, and yours; it is proper to not let sympathy rule you, or listen to his protestations of how much he's hurt himself."

There is real irony laced beneath the words, unforced and unfeigned. He recognizes his perilous footing as he speaks obliquely of it; the expression behind his veil is bittersweet.

"But he is very good at making people feel sorry for him, no? And making them want to correct him for his own sake as much as that of anyone he's hurt.

"Do you know what you want from him?"
terriblepurpose: (048)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-11-21 12:04 am (UTC)(link)
Pavlik, again, like a call from a doorstep into the dimming light of evening. Paul can't remember when he bit the inside of his cheek again, but it's finally become too tender to keep worrying at, which is almost funny, given how the rest of him feels.

Shame surfaces from somewhere. A memory-image of deference and respect, his leg curled up to his chest as he sat in a cold tent on a colder beach listening to Merlinus speak of gods and fate as his acolyte. Is he still? Is wanting to be sufficient, or only necessary? Is it different between teachers?

He never used to have to ask himself these things. They cut a slit in him as surely as God cuts a slit in the world, and though it, something bubbles up like bloodied foam.

"I don't want anything from him." In the mantle of his strangeness, Paul's shoulder sink, his eyes half-closing. "Not the way he gives people things. And what I wanted...I don't know if he understands how to give it. I don't know if he can remember. If he ever knew how."

"I came here for someone else." He steels himself, drawing up into a column. "If he has anything to say to me, he can say it. He doesn't need you to negotiate for him with me." A sigh like the sizzle of water on hot metal. "You don't need to intercede. Please. You do too much already. Let this be one less, if you want to help me. Let me take that off your shoulders."
lipochrome: (23)

[personal profile] lipochrome 2022-11-05 03:48 am (UTC)(link)
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.
terriblepurpose: (018)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-11-13 12:39 am (UTC)(link)
Most people would have broken before now. The living human body is not built to stand in stillness for hours, without rest or succour. Exhaustion accumulates in the limbs, in the compromise of the bipedal spine, and in the breathing animal spirit of the flesh.

Paul feels none of this. The unliving flame that inhabits him burns such frailties away in sheets of crumbling pale ash, leaving nothing behind but his animate will. The sensation should disturb him. He thinks that it might. He cannot bridge the disconnect between thought-self and body-self to find out if it does, and he knows this is a warning sign he should heed.

It is important to remain human. He has to remember that, and when the inchoate mare picks her uncertain way towards him, reading the fear in her quivering flanks and flicking ears helps. He remembers to breathe (he was breathing before; he must have been breathing), remembers to knit his brows together in concern as he raises a hand and holds it out to her, slow and soothing.

When Kiriona manifests on the threshold, his empty eyes flick up to her, briefly, before they fall back to her Omen.

"There you are," Paul says, as his towering Omen shifts her bulk to curl around him, her maw drawing shut as she lays in a coil, "You've looked better."
lipochrome: (30)

[personal profile] lipochrome 2022-11-20 10:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Big Boy tentatively inspects the offered hand, bringing her muzzle up close to it and flaring her nostrils. Whatever she smells, it doesn't frighten her, and she nuzzles in closer, in greeting. She passes through the hand, still insubstantial, and it feels like ice against living skin. Big Boy does not seem to notice, or if she does, she doesn't mind.

Kiriona looks on at the entire scene with disgust.

Paul is a not-human thing inside a human body; Kiriona is a soul in a body no one should ever inhabit. That should give Kiriona some comfort, but all it does is affirm how badly her return has been for him. How he wants Gideon, not Kiriona. She can't give him what he wants, so why be around him at all?

She shouldn't take the bait. But he wants Gideon, right? So be it. Gideon loved picking fights.

"Yeah, well. It's been a long six months." She does not step closer. "Way to make me feel good about myself though. Like, damn. I think I look great." Kiriona's smile is a scar stretched across her face. "The perfect expression of cavalierhood, and of the Emperor's will. All the ladies are jealous. You look it, too, and lemme tell you what, it's a bad vibe."
terriblepurpose: (118)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-11-22 12:32 am (UTC)(link)
The relief of the cold passing through his hand is staggering. If Paul were anyone else, he might choke on a hitching sob, whirl to pursue Big Boy for the sake of remembering what it's like: winter rains, deep bays, the bite of frost, the high and howling winds off the northern shores.

But there's Gideon become Kiriona, and she's right. He wants her, picking fights. He wants that more than cold or succour. He wants it badly enough to have come all this way for it, at the very threshold of the house of someone he wishes was as uncomplicated as his enemy. He stays where he is.

"I apologize. Perhaps I'm being unfair." Paul looks Kiriona over properly, head to toe, taking his time from the crown of fronds to the shiny boots, with all the crisp white and gleaming braid in between.

"You look like a gilded prick," he says, thoughtfully, tipping his shining head to the right. "Is that better?"
lipochrome: (08)

[personal profile] lipochrome 2022-11-24 01:41 am (UTC)(link)
Gilded prick? Kiriona snorts. Paul's going to have to do better than that if he wants to offend her. She grew up on the Ninth, after all, and she's just spent the last six months with no one but Ianthe for company. Ianthe, of all people! Ianthe would talk circles around Paul. The image is almost funny, were it not frankly pathetic for the both of them.

"More accurate, I guess. Although it still just sounds like you're mad about my makeover." Kiriona shrugs, attempting to project an air of extreme nonchalance and cool. (That always works, right?) "Die mad about it. I'm not gonna take fashion tips from a guy who looks like he hasn't had a real shower in a week. Like, damn, even the dead girl knows you smell like shit."

They could do this all day, and part of Kiriona wants to. Then she'd neither be loved nor alone, and that's the best possible outcome, right? You can't get hurt like that. You can't think that things might get better, and then set yourself up to be hurt.

But ew, bad, yuck. That's way too much navel-gazing. Kiriona is better off leaving that shit to Ianthe.

"Look, what do you want? You're really killing my vibe out here, you know."

Big Boy, meanwhile, has moved on from Paul's palm and is now inspecting the large worm. Kiriona tries not to pay attention to either of them.
terriblepurpose: (072)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-11-24 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
The sand worm stirs at Big Boy's approach, the blunt point of her closed mouth parting slightly to sample the air before gingerly inching closer for the other Omen's investigation. She stays low to the soil but not in it, as close to submission as anything of her mighty stature can be.

Her Sleeper makes a sound like the roll of rasping teeth, a shuddering approximation of a laugh. He shifts to his left foot, right heel rising as he digs his toes into the dirt, an old restless tell. He smells like the shoreline, and it is less palatable than poets make it out to be. He sinks his foot back down and brushes at his salt-struck stiff curls, tucking them behind one ear.

"I want to hear what you have to say," he says, "I didn't think you'd answer if I called. This seemed like the next best thing."

As if showing up on someone's lawn as an avatar of devouring flame is only the next natural alternative.

"So here I am." He spreads his hands at his sides, palms out to her. "Hoping I didn't waste a journey."
lipochrome: (17)

[personal profile] lipochrome 2022-11-24 06:06 pm (UTC)(link)
So he won't leave until she talks to him. Got it. Message received. Kiriona, privately, thinks it's a real dick move to show up to someone's house on fire to get someone to talk to you. Kind of manipulative, maybe. But she also knows she's not above dick moves, and for once, Kiriona doesn't choose hypocrisy.

Kiriona closes her eyes, pauses, then opens them. She sighs and runs her fingers through her hair, and that's a tell, too. The weakness of a living girl, on display on a dead body.

"Fine. But once I tell you, you've gotta go away." Kiriona doesn't wait to find out if he's got that. It's a demand, not a request.

"Anyway. Like I said, it's been six months. I'm different now, if you couldn't tell." She huffs a laugh at that, a twisted, wrong version of the Gideon who used to laugh at her own jokes. "But you don't want me like this. I can tell. Nonagesimus didn't want me dead, and now I've gone and disappointed both of you."

"Doesn't matter, though. You know, neither of you bothered to ask me what I want, but since you're, like, the world's most fucked-up version of my houseguest, I'll tell you for free. I wanted this." Kiriona spreads her arms wide, as if gesturing to the scene around her. "The status. The power. The all-important father, and the Cohort leadership, and especially the parades, and you can go fuck yourself if you think you're going to take it from me."

During the entire speech, Big Boy says nothing. She only shivers, tucking herself as close to the large worm as she possibly can. It feels like nothing.

For Kiriona, it's mortifying. "Cut that shit out," she demands of her soul, and the last of it falls apart into the barest cloud of ash-gray smoke.
terriblepurpose: (082)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-11-27 11:16 pm (UTC)(link)
The manipulation is shameless. Paul has reserved his shame for everything else. This is the least terrible thing he knows how to do in this moment, the alternative to so much more and worse.

That justifies nothing. He is not particularly concerned with justification. At least not his own.

"I'm asking now," he says, softly, as her Omen breaks apart to the shivering dismay of his own. Her armored plates rasp over each other as she probes the space Big Boy left behind, bereft of the intangible vibrations that marked her presence. A person might call it play acting, knowing as they do that Omens are not confined to the mere five senses, that it causes them no harm to be dismissed - but Paul thinks that it is more that a being may take on the behaviours of the shape they are set in, whatever it may be.

The whiteness of her coat is awful against Kiriona's corpse-cooled skin. The vivid hue of her hair stands out like a rusted bloodstain.

"But if we're talking about not bothering to ask, why do you think I want to take anything away from you?" Slow and measured, as calm as his Omen is not as she snuffles at the dirt. "What made you decide I don't want you? Like this. Like anything. You think you're the one I'm disappointed in?"

He doesn't let the questions settle. He doesn't expect them to be answered - not truly, not like this. Not after the next one he'll ask.

"You think I don't understand wanting your father?"
lipochrome: (27)

[personal profile] lipochrome 2022-12-20 10:18 pm (UTC)(link)
Paul knows her well. Kiriona keeps her cool through Paul's first round of stupid questions. It's unclear why he's even bothering to ask them at all. He's still not asking her what she wants; he's still just assuming. Besides, what is she supposed to tell him? That she will never forget the way he looked her, fear laced through his wide eyes? Does he want her to explain to him how fear is just one step on a surprisingly short journey to disgust, how, after bearing the disgust from an entire planet for eighteen years, she cannot risk bearing his?

Fat chance. He is awful like this, too, all burned and grieving. He should hate her for what she's done to him. She hopes he still might. It would make this all so much easier.

Then Paul asks that last question, and he must hate her, because why would he ask her that if he didn't?

"Fuck off. You don't understand." Kiriona's voice is rising, the last of her control slipping away. She is so lucky she cannot cry. "You had one for sixteen years. Sixteen. I had fucking zero. You want him because that's what you're used to, like you're fucking entitled to it." Entitled to his father. Entitled to hers. "I want --"

Kiriona takes a breath she does not need. "You should go. Don't come back."

She is so lucky.
terriblepurpose: (030)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-12-27 10:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Paul is eager to please, obedient to a fault. It's a tectonic flaw, the crux of the long chain that carried him from a cold beach to a cold earth, the anchor that holds down so much of what he's done for her.

Paul wants Gideon to be happy. He wants her to be safe. He wants her to have all of the things he believes her to be entitled to.

The thing that stands on the lawn wants this for her as much as he does.

The corona around his head flares like a star. The light is pitiless and consuming; it swallows shadows and casts none before it, arcing into refracted halos that spin in shivering orbits above him. His Omen raises herself up inside the stark, fragmented colours that pour off of him with the iridescence of a chemical fire.

She's finally being selfish. There's part of him, in the conflagration of rejection, that's almost glad for her.

"If that's what you want," he says, and he doesn't recognize the language, cannot know if she will understand the words, but he knows she will understand the shape of the sound. He turns to his Omen and scales her, impossibly, finding handholds on her hide that he should not know exist, but there they are under his fingers. She sings for him, and her song trembles in the dirt. He flattens his hands on her back when he's astride her and looks down at Kiriona, Crown Prince, in the seat of her dominion.

"No faith that we betray," he tells her, in clean, short Galach, ice crashing into cold water, impossibly human out of the hellstorm of brilliance still sheathing him, "You call, I answer. Remember that."

With that, he digs his knees into his Omen's sides, bidding her and the crown inside of him to follow Kiriona's command, turning back towards the sea. He won't look back to her, or the house that looms behind her. He doesn't need to. He doesn't forget.