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

[terriblepurpose]

"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]

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]

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]

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]

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."